Kalongo Hospital in Uganda is on high alert. Medics are facing the pandemic amid an already precarious healthcare situation, in a country with only 55 intensive care beds.
There is no such thing as bad food. It’s all about the context
Food contains the energy of the sun and every living being needs this energy to be able to live, think, fall in love, run and play as well as for many other actions that it would be impossible to list here in detail. For this reason I’ve always reasoned about the fact that humans can’t produce antibodies against food
Food contains the energy of the sun and every living being needs this energy to be able to live, think, fall in love, run and play as well as for many other actions that it would be impossible to list here in detail. For this reason I’ve always reasoned about the fact that humans can’t produce antibodies against food from the point of view of evolutionism. It would be as if a car with an internal combustion engine was equipped with a tool that destroys the petrol coming from the carburettor, or a wind plant would distance the flows of air from the turbines.
If people had produced antibodies against energy over the course of millions of years, the human race would have been extinct a long time ago.
With the support of science I always think that food is a source of energy and the photons of the sun are converted into biological entities in plants and animals. This allows living beings to use this energy to extract and then use their own energy. For this reason I’ve always distrusted those who propose to avoid eating some foods due to hypothetical food intolerances and, mostly, to the fact that these products are absolutely bad.
Is there bad food?
There are junk-foods that shouldn’t be eaten. But among the foods eaten by humans during their evolution I can’t find any that should be condemned or criticised.
The truth lies beyond apparent and temporary certainties, so I’ve learnt to know that scientists and ideologists don’t hold the absolute truth. Just consider what has been told for years about animal fats and their link with cardiovascular diseases.
Everybody thought that this was the truth until it was found that the Inuit, a group of indigenous people inhabiting the regions above the Arctic polar circle, fed on fried, steamed or baked animal fat (derived from bears, seals or salmon). Despite this fact, the Inuit had a very low rate of cardiovascular diseases and tumour thanks to the Omega-3 fatty acids of fish, which balance the other animal fats. Today there are excellent Omega-3 of vegetable origin like the Perilla and flax oil, but in those years, the truth that scientists thought to hold, was denied by new research.
The ideological drift
Although I disapprove of the fact that in the last decades the amount of gluten included in cereals has considerably increased, I’ve realised that today there’s an inexplicable ideological drift from gluten. Food-induced inflammatory reactions don’t depend on gluten itself nor on milk nor on one of its components. As any other food item, gluten triggers inflammation when it is consumed in too large amounts.
Gluten and the cereals containing it are the energy of the sun, which is vital for humans like water.
A clear example of this comes from the analysis of two inflammatory diseases of the intestines in Europe and China: Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. While a disease in Europe is related to a particular food group including wheat, yeast and milk, in China the same disease is related to soy, rice and corn. Some might say that this is a logical statement that reflects the food habits of two different populations and has to do with common sense. Unfortunately, common sense (that this time is right) goes against what physicians think. Indeed when they identify the ingredient that causes problems they don’t reflect on the evolutionist meaning of this event, they definitively condemn it. In this case, the belief that gluten and yeast are linked to intestine disorders (in Europe) is confirmed today by an ideological drift against gluten, as if gluten itself was responsible of all the evils of the world.
This is a dangerous and useless drift supported by many physicians who often suggest their patients to stop eating a food item or a food group in order to tackle the disorder. But by doing this they don’t take into account that by removing gluten – for example – from a person’s diet and replacing it with rice, it’s likely that this person becomes intolerant of rice and develops the same symptoms as before.
Food diversity, biodiversity and seasonality
The problem doesn’t depend just on a single food item, which from an evolutionist point of view can’t be dangerous, but from the way this food is consumed and interacts with the body.
Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis that in Europe are linked to gluten, milk and yeast-induced inflammation, in China are related to soy, rice and corn, according to a study published in November 2014 in PLoS One (Cai C et al, PLoS One. 2014 Nov 13;9(11):e112154. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112154. eCollection 2014).
If we linger on statistics without understanding the importance of geography we risk having a wrong perception of a certain food. A study published in 2014 in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition and conducted in the Children Hospital of Seattle (nearby the hospital of the famous TV series “Grey’s Anatomy”), assessed the medical charts of children affected by Crohn’s disease whose condition had improved before they took drugs. The improvements occurred as the cereals and carbohydrates included the children’s diet were reduced (Suskind DL et al, J Pediatr Gastroenterol Nutr. 2014 Jan; 58(1):87-91. doi: 10.1097/MPG.0000000000000103).
That’s how scientists began to suspect that reducing the amount of some cereals could alter the course of the disease.
According to this vision, a single food item should be blamed. But the real problem isn’t to decide if gluten, corn, quinoa, spelt or rice are to blame, rather, to understand that we can develop a disorder depending on how we use a food item.
Over the course of millennia human beings have consumed (wild and cultivated) cereals, receiving from nature an important support. In 2008 a study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology revealed that the body tolerates every type of whole cereals and that the immune system positively reacts to them. (Yamazaki K et al, J Allergy Clin Immunol 2008 Jan;121(1):172-178.e3. Epub 2007 Oct 24).
So, every single cereal triggers the production of IL10 (interleukin that stimulates food tolerance) and, at the same time, inhibits the production of substances generating inflammation and allergy. In order to maintain this effect it’s sufficient not to turn one food item into the only – or almost only –source of energy.
The things to consider in order for people to feel good and recover from a disease
The geographical, historical and cultural provenance of food, as well as individuality, should be considered for people to feel good, and heal and recover from ailments, because people living in different contexts need different foods that are suitable for them.
Eliminating forever a food item from the diet is a mistake. Nature offers foods that are suitable for the development of human beings in every part of the world and even in case of a temporary reaction to a certain food, it’s possible to reintroduce it in the diet, as happens with weaning in newborns, in order to have available the widest variety of food and the highest efficiency.
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