You Are What You Eat

You Are What You Eat

Or, as the Beatles put it in “Savoy Truffle,” “You all know what you eat you are, but what is sweet now, turns so sour.” We shall see just how sour.

The winter of 1970-71 was a tough one outside and a weird one inside. Weird in my brain and weird in the atmosphere of the black-light-lit sleeping room that a friend described as looking like: “the inside of Edgar Alan Poe’s Mind.” It started with me at a bottom so low that, short of a sudden plunge of six feet, any movement had to be upward. The next winter began with me in the same dismal state. In between were sandwiched three new, and much happier, lives, just like Mr. Mason promised me: “…lots of changing faces and lots of things to be…”

I’ll save most of that story for my memoir, or perhaps another post, but that winter I discovered my first “food lady,” Adelle Davis, in her book Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit. While some of her ideas have not held up, the basics were spot on. And, I’m sure they contributed heavily to my new doctor telling me, forty years later, when I was 68, “you’re incredibly healthy.” He didn’t qualify it with “for an old man…” either. That was in spite of having spent another 14 years abusing my brain and body with alcohol and weed. At least, during that era, I was giving my liver something to work with, as it struggled to detoxify me.

When I first heard the phrase, “You are what you eat,” I laughed, taking it as another example of the nonsense phrases popular at the time, like “why work when you can carry your lunch?” But…could it be any other way?

Over the years, I came to see “You are what you eat,” as not only literally true, but an obvious and inescapable fact. Including air and water in the same general category as food, from what else could we fuel our body's activities, power all its systems, and build and repair its structures? Never forget: our brains are also an organ in our body. A brain that has been damaged by using, clogged up with resin and tars, and burdened with dangerous ideas and survival skills we patched together to deal with life in The Little Land, that are now interfering with life in The Real World.

Our brains need to be sharp, clean, functioning well, to help us sort out the “weird thinking” that helped us adapt to the Drug World and start seeing the world in the sometimes harsh glare of reality, but also in the soft glow of loving relationships with our families, friends, community, world, universe and God.

All that repair of our brains and bodies takes place while we sleep, and vigorous exercise will help you get that sleep without resorting to solutions that lead to trouble of one sort or another.

Meanwhile, the food industry was heading in the opposite direction, concentrating on inventive ways to fool the survival system in our brains: “That felt good. Must be good for me. Better do it again.” Sound familiar? Yes, here came another addiction, this time to “designer foods” that promised our reptile brain all the benefits our ancestors had enjoyed when they ate foods of certain tastes, smells, textures and crunches, but carefully milling out all said benefits.  I believe it was Adelle who first informed me that “they process out 40 nutrients, add 12 of them back in, and call it “enriched flour.” And now that we are beginning to learn about phytochemicals and the microbiome, it is even more likely that the supplement industry can’t replace all the missing ingredients, and in the right proportions, to support the optimal health our lifestyle and DNA make possible.

The food industry’s very well-executed attack on your wallet and health are described in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?_r=0

One item therein that really struck me was the Crunch Factor. The industry really did their homework. Noting that folks liked a certain “crunch” to their food, they designed a machine that would crunch, say, their potato chips, and measure the pressure. Focus groups would identify the “sweet spot,” and soon those crunchy more-fat-than-potato chips would be rolling off the assembly line, with just the right amount of unneeded salt to hit the “Bet-you-can’t-eat-just-one” zone. Sound familiar? Yes, me and beer. I remember telling someone in the Seventies, "I think they put something in beer to make you want more than one." Well, duh! Alcohol! Although, I’m sure they left nothing to chance there either and added a little something to the mix.

As an aside, I don’t believe the “Paleo Diet” meme is going to prove to be valid. Adelle spoke to the general idea in a chapter on the notion that you could say, “An apricot has x amount of beta carotene," when she wrote, “Which apricot? Grown where?” Humans started out eating a diet available in one location in Africa, then spread all over the globe. That led to Eskimos thriving on blubber in the Arctic Circle, then adapting back into the foodstuffs available everywhere from the prairies and forests of North America, to the jungles of South America. So, which Paleo Diet? Consumed where? By who? What will your genetics, epigenetics and microbiome thrive on? If you start scarfing blubber in hopes of having “supple arteries,” will your DNA and microbiome convert that for you?

I better save my suggestions for how to go about shopping for a nutritional program that fits your needs for another post.

Also to be discussed: How our nutritional program affects our moods. And hence our behavior, which in spite of our much-vaunted intelligence, is primarily mood driven.

Savoy Truffle is lyrically, musically and nutritionally deeper than I thought: “But you'll have to have them all pulled out after the Savoy truffle.” I never knew he was singing about Clapton’s teeth if he didn’t listen to his dentist!

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