I wanted to share with you a concept I have of abundant versus inadequate or minimally adequate nutrition.
This concept is the culmination of many hours of reading articles and watching videos and observing life, both specifically in relation to nutrition as well as more generally in life.
Part of it comes from my wife saying to our kids when they were teenagers, “Something is not clean just because you passed a cloth over it. It is clean when it has no dirt on it. After you wipe it you need to look and see if it is clean.”
Being a software developer elevated the importance of this. Just because I wrote some code was no guarantee it would perform as desired. I needed to test it to make sure it did.
This idea of checking to see if the action performed had accomplished the desired result took another notch up in importance when, during the Covid lockdowns, I was painting a carved balustrade staircase.
Sitting on the upper floor I would reach around to the side I could not see and do what I thought would put paint on the whole thing. I would then get up, lean over the top and see all the spots I had missed. Never ceased to amaze me at how much I had missed, how necessary was the quality control function of inspecting what I thought was the finished product.
Only by stopping production (taking off the painter hat) then putting on the quality control hat and looking at what I had done to see if I had gotten the product of a fully painted surface could I be sure that I had. All too often I had not. So then I took off my quality control hat, put back on my painter hat and filled in the gaps where I hadn’t.
I am sure that this action of checking the product to see if it was complete before moving on would be a huge shock to many people. Anthony Fauci included. Let alone politicians. If they even understood the concept of a product and that their actions should produce one. But I digress.
Let’s bring this concept a little closer to home. You and your body.
With nutrition, your body does the best it can with what you give it. Give it perfect nutrition, a stress and toxin free life, fresh air and exercise and who knows, it might give you good service for 150 years. After all, the adult life of most mammals is 5-7 times their growth span. So if we are fully grown by age 25, then 5-7 times that is a lifespan of 150-200 years.
Trouble is, the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink are laden with toxins, as are the clothes we wear and the cosmetics, sun screen and cleaning products we apply to our skin. And most of us do not maintain an optimum exercise regime.
And that’s not factoring in the fact that most of us eat a nutritionally deficient diet.
When we do not take in an adequate amount of nutrients for the body to operate optimally it cannot perform all functions. It has to reduce the functionality it performs. What’s it going to reduce? It does not tell the lungs to skip every third breath, the heart to skip every second beat or the brain to only perform every second calculation you request of it.
It puts on hold the maintenance functions, the anti-cancer, cleansing and restorative functions that are not required 24/7. It puts them on hold till next day or next week or next month, when we up our nutrition. You can see where I’m going with this. If we never up our nutrition to make up for what we missed, we never catch up on those deferred functions.
So, how do you determine what is an adequate level of nutrition? Well, don’t trust the RDI (Recommended Dietary Intake) as published by the government bodies of various countries. I was horrified to learn the criterion by which they set the level of RDI is that quantity of a nutrient that is sufficient to ensure 95% of people do not suffer a clinical deficiency of that nutrient. WHAT! So at least 5% of people are going to be clinically deficient even if they diligently consume the RDI! Let alone what other functionality we miss out on by only aiming to barely attain the minimum! No thought of abundance or flourishing. Just, “Let’s almost hit minimum for all.”
(Just went looking for a reference for this and the latest data I found: https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/sites/default/files/images/nutrient-refererence-dietary-intakes.pdf
Said, “Usual intake at or above this level has a low
probability of inadequacy”)
If civil engineers did that with their specifications we’d be having collapsing bridges every other day! I believe they factor in a 20% margin over maximum recommended load. And nobody would aspire to be an astronaut if rockets designers had that parameter!
So, why do we have it in our food specifications? It couldn’t be that the biggest funders make money from people being fat, sick and lazy and on their drugs. That’s just a conspiracy theory.
As a matter of fact much of what we regard as an “acceptable standard” in society is far less than optimum. It is regarded as “commercially viable”.
So, if you were being smart about it, how would you ensure you lived a healthy, enjoyable life for as long as possible? Well, you’d consume the best nutrition you could, you’d minimise your exposure to toxins, you’d do what you could to remove toxins from your body, you’d maintain a regular exercise routine, minimise your stress .
Those are the actions you would take to achieve the product of an optimally operating body.
But how do you do quality control on your body? How do you ‘look on the other side of the balustrading’ to see if you are attaining your product.
Every so often you’d get a blood/hair test of key nutrients and toxins to test your progress. To see if you were achieving the product you were working hard to attain.
Some of the key blood tests I mention in my book, ‘How To Live The Healthiest Life’ are:
CoQ10
C-Reactive Protein
Glutathione
Homocysteine
Insulin
Sedimentation Rate
Triglycerides
Vitamin D3
Vitamin B12
Super Nutrition:
https://www.healthelicious.com.au/Nutri-Blast-Greens-Plus.html
Standard Detox:
https://www.healthelicious.com.au/Nutri-Blast-Detox-Blend.html
Anti-Spike Detox:
https://www.healthelicious.com.au/NutriBlast-Anti-Spike.html