Kinection Holistic Health x Dr. Amberleigh Carter

Change Your Mind. Change Your Body.

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Are Your Nutrition Beliefs Really Yours?

Amberleigh Carter1 Comment

Do you know from where your ideas about nutrition have stemmed?  Are they your original, instinctual thoughts/tastes or are they what your culture, media, government, and "experts" tell you in order to perpetuate an industry?

Industrialists have campaigned to convince the public that their by-products, from cotton-seed oil to shrimp shells, are “health foods.”  In several parts of the world, desperately poor people sometimes eat clay, and even clay has been promoted as a health food.  Almost anything becomes “food,” when people are under economic and social pressure.  If these things aren’t acutely (or noticeably) toxic, they can become part of our “normal” diet.

Our instincts give us a few clues about our nutritional needs, such as thirst, the hunger for salt, the pleasantness of sweet things, and the unpleasantness of certain odors or very acrid or bitter tastes.  But...habits and customs become the dominant forces in diet. 

"Professional dietitians" and other "experts" primarily function as enforcers of cultural prejudice.

The following are a few examples:
1) The manufacturers of pureed vegetables for babies used to put large amounts of salt, sugar, and monosodium glutamate (things that we crave and/or imitate that we need) into their products, because the added chemicals served as instinctual signals that made the material somewhat acceptable to the babies (this is manipulating the chemicals in your brain to convince you that the food you are ingesting is good).  There was no scientific basis for providing these vegetables to babies in a form that they would accept, but it was a profitable practice that was compatible with the social pressure against prolonged breast feeding (which is a healthful human action that was made to be looked down upon, culturally).

2) Because of the depression, when many people couldn't afford enough food, in 1933 the USDA published food guides for four economic levels.  Since then, beans and other legumes have been included in the food groups, and the USDA continues its analysis of food costs, using cheap foods as the basis for food stamp allotments.  After about 20 years of being promoted as thrift foods, they started creeping into many dieticians' definition of a healthful diet.

3) Poor people, especially in the spring when other foods were scarce, have sometimes subsisted on foliage such as collard and poke greens, usually made more palatable by cooking them with flavorings, such as a little bacon grease and lots of salt.  Eventually, "famine foods" can be accepted as dietary staples.  When people try to live primarily on foliage, as in famines, they soon suffer from a great variety of diseases.  Various leaves (green, above-ground leafy vegetables) contain anti-metabolic substances that prevent the assimilation of the nutrients (slow down/damage your metabolism), and only very specifically adapted digestive systems (or technologies) can overcome those toxic effects.

Credit: Ray Peat, Ph.D.

So before you go reprimanding a child for not wanting broccoli or other culturally-acclaimed "health food", that child may just be trusting his/her gut.

Listen to your body.  You may learn something.