Lifestyles

11 Jun Lifestyles

Most people when asked about what creates a healthy life style will replay the following; “eating right, exercising and not drinking and/or smoking”, however these ideas create voids.   What does it mean to eat right?  Does it mean to have a vegan diet, or a paleo diet, or just a fruit diet, or how about no diet at all.

A “lifestyle” is nothing more than how a person or a group of people live, but when we talk about desirable lifestyles for a healthy life, then there is the need to turn to conceptual medicine and view our health not as a gift, but rather as a responsibility where keeping our health in its best possible state, requires learning what could hinder it and what could keep it healthy, so that we can enjoy a happy and long life.

A healthy lifestyle is defined by behaviors that will counteract cellular hunger; keeping in mind that if we want to keep our bodies well nourished we must eat nutritious foods.  And in order to do this we must refrain from eating two types of common foods, which prevent the assimilation of nutrients.  One to these is sugar, including all types of sugars (white, brown, molasses, honey, syrups and natural processed fruit sugars), and the other one is dairy.

We have a very small gut, sure it seems long enough for its 25ft length, but the only area where foods can be assimilated is found in its first portion measuring only 20cms known as the duodenum. Which can only assimilate very small size molecules (e.g. less than 5 molecular units).   This means that food has to be predigested before it is ingested.

Ever wonder why we are the only mammals who need to “cook” their meals?  Our stomach is too small to break down raw food, and in order to make nutrients obtainable, the cooking process allow human beings to break down big molecules into smaller ones, making the nutrients in those foods available to our gut for assimilation.

Nutrient assimilation does not happened in the way water gets absorbed into a sponge, in fact this requires enzymes or transporters, to guide them from the gut into the blood and into our liver.  These enzymes are very specific for fats, carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and minerals.  These enzymes appear on the border or lumen of our guts, just as soon as food enters into it, and as the process of stomach emptying culminates, they become less available.

Sugar and all of its derivatives are made up of very small and simple molecules, which do not require stomach digestion, so as soon as they are ingested they will pass straight into our guts eliciting the appearance of digestive enzymes.   The presence of any food including sugar within the duodenum will cause the release of all digestive enzymes, even when we would only need the enzymes for carbohydrates.  Once sugar is assimilated all other enzymes will be reabsorbed into the gut´s lumen and by the time the contents which were held in the stomach were ready for release into the gut, they will encounter less amounts of all enzymes, decreasing the amount of essential factors that we could have assimilated had there been no sugar present, and as a result our cells would be deprived of repair material resulting in cellular hunger.

With the consumption of dairy (e.g. all products derived from animal´s milk), we have another counterproductive reaction, which is called gut inflammation.  Proteins in dairy are very large and do not completely breakdown in our gut, some of these large proteins remain in our intestines unassimilated serving as food to our intestinal flora.  This causes gut flora to proliferate leading to inflammation.  An inflamed gut does a very poor job in nutrient assimilation, resulting again in cellular hunger.

If we persistently suffer from cellular hunger, our bodies will be unable to properly repair, and once we´ve reach our intestinal old age, and sadly this happens at around 30 years of age, the result could be the disaster physicians are encountering nowadays, young people which chronic illnesses.

The same can be said regarding strenuous exercise,  (read exercise post) which leads to muscle tissue inflammation and destruction; this practice exploited in the last century under the view of bettering health, does the opposite.  We are thermodynamic beings and just like all living things, we are constantly moving towards disorder, also known as aging.  Every day we grow older and this fact is undeniable and unstoppable, yet, we can control how fast or how slow we move towards our dead.   The more we use up our reserves the faster we will reach our state of equilibrium or dead, but if we are mindful in utilizing our reserves when we really need them, then we will reach our end at a slower pace and without much wear and tear, this translates into a healthier life.

The same is true for smoking and/or drinking, these two unhealthy habits only increase our wear and tear, and cellular destruction.

Lastly root canal treatments, they should not be done, any tooth that is broken or damaged beyond repair, should be removed, not kept in the person´s mouth.  Keeping it can have harmful results such as autoimmune reactions or bacterial leakage into other areas of the body that were not made to sustain such bacterial flora, leading in the long run in most patients, to suffer from a range of chronic complications that have nothing to do with their teeth, for example renal stones, gallstones and even cancers.

Through conceptual medicine, my aim is to help you understand why these simple changes are paramount to reach a healthy life, and why achieving good quality of life is attainable at any age, all it takes is learning and viewing certain aspects of our lives from a different perspective.

 

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