Healthy Life – why should we eat healthily?!

What we eat

Evolution has given us a metabolism fit to digest molecular compounds of food that has always been available to us – in other words: ORGANIC compounds (not in the sense of grown in the countryside by barefoot people with long, blond hair but just chemically organic, as opposed to inorganic).

A "map" of our metabolism, all the chemical reactions that take place in our body and how they are connected to each other















Due to industrialization, globalization and a lot of other factors, the diet especially in so-called "first world countries" has changed drastically over the last century or so, and the balance between organic and inorganic compounds that we ingest is badly disturbed in the majority of the population. 

What is inorganic food? Anything that has been processed! Instant noodles for example, the few grams of grain that might have been an ingredient for the pasta originally has been treated with so many preservatives and other chemicals before you can buy them in the supermarket that it is almost purely inorganic.

If you visited an indigenous village somewhere in the rainforest, inhabited by people who live solely of nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables and maybe meat (things they can find in nature) and handed them a bag of instant noodles and told them “This is what we eat” without telling them how to prepare it, they might take a wild attempt at consuming it by just eating it "raw". What do you think would happen? First of all, they would think we are disgusting (because that’s what it would probably taste like) and then they would get sick, because it consists of chemicals that their unspoiled bodies would not be able to digest (ours isn't either as a matter of fact, it's just used to it and stores it as waste that we think is fat everywhere on our body).

The idea behind evolution is to increase our body’s ability to succeed from an ability or a trait, that has proven to be beneficial in several generations of mutants. After a significant amount of time has passed, the majority of a population will have acquired this mutation. 

So before we started eating processed food, the diet that had proven to be the best for humans for hundreds of years (of course this statement is a bit vague, it depends on many factors for example which region of the world and social status etc., but still there is food that humanity has almost globally known for centuries to be beneficial) gave the model for what our metabolism had to cope with. 

For example: milk has been an important source of protein for a long time, so people in regions of the world where milk has been consumed for centuries now largely support lactose metabolism, which is an evolutionary mutation. Whereas many people in parts of Africa and Asia, where milk isn't traditionally consumed remain lactose intolerant.

Nowadays many people eat almost only processed food, which our whole body is not designed for dealing with. You would think the logical consequence is that eventually, maybe in a few centuries, evolution will have taken care of it and made us all cope with this new, conservable, chemical food and that we will progress even further as a species because this type of food is cheaper, more conventient because it requires less time to prepare and has a longer shelf life. 

But in reality evolution only works forwards, if the majority of the members of the species choose to disregard what they were supposed to eat, they will die out. 
If a colony of ants only drinks coca cola for a week they become extinct. And with humans it’s ultimately the same, if more and more people start eating processed food due to globalization and industrialization of third world countries, the human race is going to become extinct.

Maybe this sounds a bit dramatic, but if you look around, almost everyone knows a handful of obese people and a handful of people who have died of degenerative diseases like cancer, and by far more than a handful of people who have minor health complaints (not even to mention the people who die of starvation in those parts of the world that we don't care about because of uneven distribution of food on the planet). 

So diet is something that everybody should take seriously and NOT in the sense of “I will go on a diet until I can show myself on the beach again” – and then start eating whatever the hell you want, usually when winter starts and Christmas is coming up.

Up until a few weeks ago I ate really unhealthy food myself, but when we started learning about metabolism in biochemistry, I realized this:

Anyone who has a car knows what to put into it so that it will drive. For example if your car runs on Diesel, you will put Diesel into it, wouldn’t you? I have never heard of anyone who puts Diesel into his car in the morning but gas at night, which is the equivalent of eating a healthy breakfast and unhealthy dinner.

So what would happen to a car that runs on Diesel if you ONLY fill it with gas? It’s not very hard to figure out and that’s why nobody does it. 
Unfortunately - or fortunately - our body is much more resistant than a car and even years of wrong “fuel” can go relatively unnoticed before the organism takes serious damage.

I don’t know if this allegory has such an effect on anyone else, but once I realized this I thought why should I eat things that are not good for me? Or: why don't I treat my car like crap but I treat my body like crap? 

Which brings us to the biggest question: what is good for me? I researched extensively over the last few weeks and have found a way to live healthily without any extra expenses (Hah, it’s even cheaper than to live off fast food!).

The reason why I started researching the topic (apart from biochemistry) was the movie “Hungry for change” which should be obligatory for everybody to watch. So if you don’t know it, WATCH IT! http://www.hungryforchange.tv/

Besides the beneficial health effects, it's also nice to know that you're not being held by the ankles by the food industry anymore, who gets you hooked on sugar and other addictive substances so that you will keep buying their products at the expense of people in developing countries, who are systematically exploited by that industry. 

Yeah I know, it all sounds like a lot of newage hippie bullshit, but so far I haven't found a reason to stop eating healthily...