Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food

by Catherine Shanahan

Industrial fat products like vegetable oils are toxic to your arteries because they contain delicate polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) that are particularly prone to oxidative damage, especially when exposed to heat and when separated from the antioxidants that would otherwise help protect them from that oxidative damage. I know, that’s nowhere near as catchy as “cholesterol clogs your arteries.” But it is what the research evidence supports.

GOOD FATS AND BAD Good Fats These traditional fats can handle the heat involved in processing or cooking. Olive oil Peanut oil Butter (Yes, butter!) Macadamia nut oil Coconut oil Animal fats (lard, tallow) Palm oil Any artisanally produced unrefined oil Bad Fats These industrial-era fats cannot handle the heat involved in processing or cooking. Canola oil Soy oil Sunflower oil Cottonseed oil Corn oil Grapeseed oil Safflower oil Non-butter spreads (including margarine) and the so-called trans-free spreads

Over the past one hundred years in the United States, our fat intake has gone from largely animal-based and natural to plant-based and so unnatural that our bodies can’t adapt.

Vegetable oils contain mostly heat-sensitive polyunsaturated fats. When heated, these fragile fats turn into toxic compounds including trans fat.258 The heat sensitivity issue means that all processed vegetable oils, and all products that contain vegetable oil, necessarily contain trans fat.

I once purchased a package of dried cranberries only to discover, after I brought it home and read the label, that they were coated with vegetable oil.

Bioconcentration is usually used in reference to pollutants. When you spray plants with herbicides and pesticides, some gets taken up into their tissues. When animals eat these plants, they also eat the pesticides and herbicides. The majority of these chemicals are fat-soluble and will accumulate in fat. Since vegetables are naturally low in fat, when you buy organic vegetables, you are only avoiding a little bit of poison. When you buy organic meat, especially the fatty cuts, you’re avoiding a lot.

Research has shown that caribou can see which blades of grass are the most nutrient-rich and preferentially graze on those. Presumably, other herbivores also have the same ability. This suggests that organically raised animals kept in confinement will not be as healthy as those raised on large pastures. And a creature living freely in the wild should be healthiest of all. So if you hunt, or if you know a hunter who has extra, don’t let this amazing resource go to waste: eat as much of the animal as you know how!

Not only do bone broths build healthy joints, the calcium and other minerals help to grow your bones.

Vegetarians in particular will benefit from these two potent methodologies for enhancing nutrition because getting adequate protein is more challenging on a plant-based diet since even the most protein-rich plants also contain a good deal of blood-sugar–elevating carbohydrate, whereas most high-protein animal foods are zero carb. How do the processes of fermentation and sprouting reduce carbohydrate content? During the sprouting process, enzymes convert energy-rich storage starch into the many nutrients a seedling requires. During fermentation, multiplying microbes seek out simple sugars and convert them into a wide variety of nutrients they use for their own growth.

Although I disagree, some investigators have gone so far as to suggest that “nearly all the carcinogens in the diet are of natural rather than—as widely perceived—industrial origin.”

Soybeans contain chemicals called goitrogens and phytoestrogens, which disrupt thyroid and sex hormone function.

Commercially made soymilk, tofu, and soy-based infant formulas, on the other hand, are not. Loaded with goitrogens and phytoestrogens, overconsumption of these foods is known to cause hypo- and hyperthyroidism, thyroid cancer, and—particularly during infancy or pregnancy—male and female reproductive disorders.

Even your refrigerator can’t keep fresh fruits and vegetables from declining in nutrient content. For instance, refrigerated green beans lose 77 percent of their vitamin C content after only seven days off the vine.

best sauerkraut you’ve ever tasted. And it’s ridiculously easy: shred a whole, large cabbage in the food processor or thin-slice by hand. Mix with a full tablespoon of salt and a little liquid from a jar of pickles (or other fermented vegetable product) and pack into a lightproof container with something heavy, like a jar full of water, sitting on top to keep the cabbage under the liquid. Cover with a towel to keep the bugs off. Wait a week or so, and eat.

You can sprout any kind of seed you want, from kidney beans to wheat berries and more. Simply put some into a jar, cover with water, then cover with a bug-proof cloth and, in anywhere from one to four days, the seeds will start to germinate. On day two, drain and rinse the seeds to be sure to wash any mold spores away. You’ll need to rinse the seeds once or twice a day depending on local humidity. You can tell once they’ve awakened because you’ll see a tiny white rootlet begin to take form. That’s the point at which it’s ready to be used as a vitamin-rich version of an ordinary kidney bean or wheat berry. Or even easier than doing it yourself, you can buy breads made with sprouted grain in health food stores. Usually, you have to look in the freezer section because, without artificial preservatives, these breads mold quickly.

If you want whole wheat look for the words whole wheat flour. Or better yet, grind up wheat berries in a coffee grinder and use them to bake your own bread.

The idea behind all antioxidant supplements on the market is the same: to give the consumer a blend of electron-trapping chemicals that help prevent the two most common causes of tissue inflammation and degenerative disease: lipid oxidation and advanced-glycation-end-product formation

“If you want antioxidants, skip the latest fad products and use that money to buy fresh food.”

Family names for some of the more common antioxidants include flavinoids, terpenes, phenolics, coumarins, and retinoids (vitamin A precursors).

Studies show that a mere one percent of the retinoids (vitamin A precursors) in raw carrots, for instance, get absorbed.503 But cooking (which hydrolyzes cellulose in much the same way it hydrolyzes proteins) increases that percentage to 30.

This is why we need to cook our meat so gently, and why raw meat and seafood dishes comprise a valuable part of many international diets, from sashimi in Japan to ceviche in Spain and South America to steak tartare, popular around the world.

A breakfast of yogurt, fresh fruit slices, and nuts is nutritionally far superior to cold cereal and processed milk.

Meat on the bone will bring enough of the glycosaminoglycan growth factors and bone-building minerals

Organ meats bring the vitamins and brain-building fats

Fermented foods, full of probiotics, protect the intestinal tract from invading pathogens.

Sprouted foods enable you to enjoy your breads and breakfast porridges without consuming the empty calories that cause obesity and diabetes.

And finally, fresh foods are naturally loaded with more antioxidants than can possibly survive the processes of drying, overcooking, or being stuffed into a capsule and bottled.

If you build your diet on the foundation of the Four Pillars, and get regular exercise and plenty of sleep, you will immediately notice vast improvements in how you feel. Those differences will compound over the years to keep you looking young.

There are only two steps to doing that: (1) Find the best ingredients grown on the richest soil in the most wholesome, sustainable manner; and (2) Ensure that your body can use those nutrients most efficiently by preparing the raw materials according to the foundational principles of the Human Diet: the Four Pillars of World Cuisine.

Turns out, weight gain and loss isn’t so much about energy as it is about information.

“Omega-3 comes from things like eggs, cold-water fatty fish, and plants people don’t eat anymore, like flax.”

in the Paleolithic era we ate roughly ten times more omega-3 than we do now, and far less omega-6.

So the Deep Nutrition formula for weight loss is simple: Get rid of inflammation that blocks cellular communication, and eat foods that enable you to convert fat cells into healthier tissues.

So in order to reshape your body and achieve maximum health, your regimen must include eating real food, resting properly, reducing stress, and doing the right kinds of exercise.

If you’ve read chapters 7, 8, and 9, you know that heating vegetable oils leads to the formation of oxidized and distorted fats called MegaTrans,

To successfully avoid eating oxidized fats, you must avoid all foods containing vegetable oils. As I described in Chapter 7, vegetable oils are high in polyunsaturated fats, which are particularly prone to oxidation and readily deform into the collection of distorted fatty acids I call MegaTrans.

Eating foods like butter, cream, and coconut oil can protect against some of the worst effects of oxidation and can actually help you lose weight.

To Avoid Inflammation, Keep Total Daily Sugar Intake Under 100 Grams

Because carbohydrates in your food are converted into sugars, a diet high in pastas, breads, and so on is inherently pro-inflammatory as well.

keep their total carbohydrate intake to less than 100 grams per day (this total includes sugars and “complex” carbs like starches).

A metabolic process called transdifferentiation can make fat cells leave your adipose tissue and migrate to become new muscle, bone, and even brain cells.

Exercise is important because it generates signals to build muscle—or bone or other lean tissues—instead of unwanted fat.

EXERCISE WORKS AT LEAST THREE WAYS 1. It increases insulin sensitivity, so you need less insulin to get sugar out of your bloodstream. This allows your insulin levels to drop, which tells your fat cells to slow the conversion of sugar into more fat. 2. It reduces the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol packs fat around organs (as opposed to under the skin), where it produces lots of pro-inflammatory chemicals, which in turn tell the body to produce still more fat. 3. It builds new blood vessels through muscle and adipose tissues, which enables your body to more readily burn fat.

What’s more, fat cells can be convinced to undergo the same kind of cellular suicide that tumor cells can, a process called apoptosis.

Today, few places remain on this planet where people flavor food with homemade broths instead of with MSG, where they still ferment vegetables and meats instead of storing them in the fridge, where they eat every part of the animal instead of just a few cuts.

If you want an athletic, svelte, attractive figure, then don’t fight your body. Call a truce by eating according to the Human Diet, exercising, cutting stress, and getting a full night’s sleep.

Day one: eat two eggs cooked in 2 tablespoons of butter for breakfast and see if you’re hungry

If sugar and fatty acids can’t make the journey from wherever they were (usually your digestive system) into a proper fat-storage cell, then they end up lining your arteries, seeping into your tendons, and polluting your body. Now, instead of building fat, you just get sick. White blood cells will have to enter these polluted segments of artery, joint, or any other compromised tissue and try to clean up the mess. But white blood cells cause inflammation, which damages tissues (including arterial walls), makes your joints hurt, and clots your blood. This is why a diet that makes you fat also makes you feel bad, raises your blood pressure, and causes diabetes, heart disease, kidney problems, and so many other diseases. It’

Fortunately, fat cells can be retrained.

The more aware we are of the act of exercising, the more we engage our muscles.