Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food

by Catherine Shanahan

But in the current healthcare system, people don’t receive the most powerful form of preventative medicine—a comprehensive dietary education.

What John’s medical providers couldn’t offer him—what few doctors can offer any of their patients—was a crash course in healthy eating. Without this knowledge, he was left vulnerable to a most insidious killer: the standard American diet.

NBA. And so, with me as a member of their training staff, we developed the PRO (Performance Recovery Orthogenesis) Nutrition Program and created a partnership with Whole Foods Markets to ensure that no player, whether on the road or at home, would have to rely on junk food if they didn’t want to. Since that time other NBA teams have developed relationships with Whole Foods Markets with excellent results—a trend toward real food in professional sports that is certain to grow.

And that’s when I got a taste of the bitter truth. “We have to feed the masses. There’s just not enough olive oil for everyone,” Mr. Henning told me. So there we had it.

This book will describe the common rules that link all successful diets.

All diets are just effective theories to simplify the complex rules of nutrition. Though Newtonian gravity did get us to the moon...

A 2010 study looking into how poor maternal nutrition and obesity affects subsequent generations concluded, “Poor in utero nutrition may be a major contributor to the current cycle of obesity.”33 The article shows that children born to overweight mothers are epigenetically programmed to build adipose tissue in unhealthy amounts. This suggests that millions of malnourished moms are, unbeknownst to them, programming their children for a lifetime of being overweight, and that this predisposition for putting on the pounds can be passed down to that child’s children as well.

Why would DNA react this way? If you look for the logic in this decision, you might see it like this: by smoking during pregnancy, you are telling the embryo that the air is full of toxins and that breathing is sometimes dangerous. The developing lungs would do well to be able to react quickly to any inhaled irritants. Asthmatic lungs are over-reactive. They cough and spit at the slightest whiff of foreign aerosols. Still, I believe even a genome as abused as this can be reminded of normal function.

Is this proven?

To further the analogy, it’s conceivable that genetic modifications are introduced under a protocol similar to that used by software designers: test for bugs, then run concurrent with other software on a provisional basis (the beta version of the program), then integrate into the operating system, and finally—when proved to be indispensable—build it into the hardware.

a kind of safety net. Living in settled, relatively crowded cities began to chip away at our genetic programming, leading to the rise of disease while simultaneously enabling people with damaged genes, who might otherwise have died, to survive and give birth to less healthy children with less dynamic symmetry. Bit by bit, the genetic wealth created by thousands of years of successful survival in the wild was squandered as poverty or plague denied genes the nutrients they needed. During each period of nutritional deprivation valuable epigenetic programming was lost.

Would like to see more data on this

Since the migration from real to fake food has occurred over five generations, even our parents were likely born into an environment bereft of culinary tradition. Cheap and convenient products catch on quick, and we tend not to ask where they were made or what they were made of, so the easier and cheaper our food gets, the less we think about it. The merging of business and science into one corporate body means that medical science can no longer countenance advice incompatible with the interests of commerce. A constant stream of new technologic fixes continues to buttress our collapsing physiologic infrastructure, which has so far masked what would otherwise be obvious maladaptive consequences of that collapse.

Long-term sugar abuse actually rewires the human brain, until we are all—in a very real sense—cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

California, San Francisco, the reason exercise treats obesity is not because it “burns” calories. “That’s ridiculous,” he says. “Twenty minutes of jogging is one chocolate chip cookie. I mean, you can’t do it. One Big Mac requires three hours of vigorous exercise to burn off. That’s not the reason exercise is important.”548 Exercise is important because it generates signals to build muscle—or bone or other lean tissues—instead of unwanted fat.

Today acne is the most common skin disease, with nearly 90 percent of adolescents affected.595 But there’s little evidence that acne occurred at anything near these rates in the distant past, and many dermatologists believe it is a modern disease.