Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food

by Catherine Shanahan

We presume we are entranced by beautiful faces because we are sexually attracted, but it may be that we are attracted to their patterns.

Why would biology program us to be hot for “genetic freaks”? It seems to me far more probable that we are attracted to beautiful bodies because they advertise superlative health.

In keeping with this idea, researchers studying the effect of these four female body types on life span find that women with the most attractive of the four body types, the hourglass, not only live the longest, they also live better.

Statistics consistently show that having a longer, slimmer waist and more womanly hips correlates with reduced diagnoses of infertility,116 osteoporosis,117 cancer,118 cognitive problems,119 abdominal ane...

Many vitamins exist in nature as entire families of related molecules, only a few of which can be recreated in a factory. For example, there may be over 100 isomers of vitamin E, but only about 16 are put into tablets.164 Second, the processing of synthetic vitamins necessarily involves the creation of incidental molecular byproducts, the effects of which are largely unknown.

my disproportionately sized eye sockets distorted the shape of my eyeball, forcing my lens to focus light to a point in front of (rather than on) my retinas, blurring my vision.

These two ingredients are different. Not only does each one seem perfectly engineered to prevent our cells from functioning the way they should, they often appear as a tag-team duo, showing up in the same foods together. I’m talking about vegetable oils and sugar. I’m not saying that all the pollutants and toxins so often talked about aren’t hurting our health. They are. But because vegetable oil and sugar are so nasty and their use in processed foods so ubiquitous that they have replaced nutrient-rich ingredients we would otherwise eat, I place vegetable oil and sugar before all others, on the very top of my don’t eat list.

Over the past century, as butter consumption dropped to less than one quarter of what it was (from eighteen pounds per person per year to four), vegetable oil consumption went up five-fold (from eleven pounds per person per year to fifty-nine).

What’s been dropping us like flies is not any upsurge in saturated fat consumption, but an upsurge in consumption of two major categories of pro-inflammatory foods: vegetable oils (a.k.a. unnatural fats) and sugar. Cutting both from your diet will not only protect your heart, it will help protect you from all chronic diseases.

In the late 1800s, Emperor Napoleon III offered a prize for a butter substitute to feed his army and “the lower classes.”247 The goal was a product that cost very little and wouldn’t rot on extended sea voyages. After some experimentation, a chemist named Hippolyte Mege-Mourie found that squeezing slabs of tallow under pressure extracted oily elements that fused into a solid when churned together with skim milk. The dull gray material had a pearly sheen and so Mege-Mourie called it margarine, after the Greek margarites, meaning “pearl.” It didn’t taste good, but it was cheap.

One of the fundamental concepts of this book is that physical beauty isn’t, as it turns out, in the eye of the beholder. Beautiful living things are the manifestations of the immutable laws of natural growth, rules grounded in mathematics. These rules apply everywhere, even at the molecular level.

Lipid is a generic term for both fats and oils. If the lipid is solid at room temperature, it’s called fat. If it’s liquid, it’s oil. Butter is solid, so it’s called a fat. In general, lipids made of stiff, inflexible saturated fats are solid and those made of fluid, flexible unsaturated fats are liquid.

Whether the newly introduced electron ousts another lover from his bed or fails to find anyone willing to partner with him, in no time commune number two will have to deal with a lonely electron knocking down walls and wreaking havoc and forcing the commune members to hold an emergency meeting. Until such time that a patchouli-wearing therapist antioxidant, such as the totally groovy vitamin E, shows up to say, “Whoa, dudes. I’ll take your extra lover … it’s all good … I’ve got another therapist friend I work with called vitamin C and, like, the whole even-number lovers thing will be, like, totally restored,” this chaotic process will continue, leaving each and every affected commune permanently changed—and not for the better.

free radical cascades make your food extremely crispy. (Free radical cascades also happen to play a role in the polymerization reactions that make plastic solid. This is probably the origin of the well-intentioned, but not strictly scientific, assertion that “margarine is one molecule away from plastic.”) On the minus side, free radical cascades make your arteries extremely crispy. They will also damage other bodily tissues, which can generate inflammation, a kind of chemical chaos that interferes with normal metabolic function.

The controversial 2013 revision of the cholesterol guidelines means nearly half of the United States population between the ages of forty and seventy-five can now be labeled “high risk.”303 And drug companies are raking it in. According to Harvard’s Dr. John Abramson and former New England Journal of Medicine editor Dr. Jerome Kassirer, the reason our medical leadership plays along, unflinchingly insisting that there’s no potential harm from pushing these numbers so low, may stem from financial conflicts of interest.

cooking iron-containing foods in vegetable oil could be an important cause of inflammation-related gastrointestinal disorders including heartburn, gastritis (stomach lining inflammation), and ulcers.

If you are thinking about cutting out gluten, dairy, or other common foods but haven’t yet eliminated vegetable oils, I’d recommend you consider cutting out vegetable oils first. Cutting out vegetable oil is far easier to accomplish than limiting your exposure to nearly ubiquitous toxic food contaminants, or avoiding any side effects of medications that you’re not able to discontinue, and is an essential first step toward eliminating intestinal parasites and other infections.

Of all the organs in your body, the brain is most dependent on a steady stream of fresh antioxidants to defend against oxidative stress. But because vegetable oils can deplete your brain of its antioxidants, they can also compromise this most important brain-defense mechanism, leaving your delicate nerve cells subject to destructive free radical reactions and potentially devastating inflammation.

Although your brain represents just about 2 percent of your total weight, it uses a full 20 percent of the calories you’re burning each minute while you sit quietly at rest. Brain cells, like all cells, produce energy by oxidizing (burning) a variety of fuels in little chambers called mitochondria.

Your thoughts are made of electric impulses. As an idea is about to manifest, electricity in the brain travels down the length of a nerve until it reaches a synapse. At the synapse, it must jump from one nerve to the next, or the thought you were about to have will evaporate before it can ever form.

It’s impossible not to notice the popularity of gluten-free diets these days—now that some supermarkets have entire aisles stocked only with gluten-free products. The argument behind these diets is that, in its most basic form, modern-day wheat bears little resemblance to its distant ancestor, the wheat cultivated ten thousand years ago. Proponents argue that modern wheat triggers inflammation, an overactive immune response, and plays a role in nearly every disease you can name, including brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia, depression, and more.

vegetable-oil-free/high-antioxidant diet, along with plenty of restorative sleep and exercise, is the best strategy to slow the oxidation in your brain so you can remain sharp and independent, ideally, until the day you die.

Monty Python does a skit where they sing about the preciousness of every single sperm, funny in part because a man’s testes produce 1,500 sperm per second.