It's not just what you eat that determines your health but also how well you digest, absorb and use the food. A healthy digestive tract, therefore, is essential if you are to enjoy good health. If it was laid out flat, your digestive tract would have a surface area about the size of a tennis court, and it is a quarter the thickness of a sheet of paper. This is the barrier between you - that is, the cells that make up your body - and the food you eat.
Each morsel of ingested food passes through three processes: the breakdown of food into simple units (digestion); the transport of nutrients across the gut membrane into the blood (absorption); and the selective ejection of waste (elimination). For this process to work efficiently your digestion needs good food. Giving your digestive tract "low grade fuel" puts undue strain on the system, because the extra effort required to deal with inappropriate foods is wasted energy and it draws on your body's reserves of nutrients in an attempt to cope. These valuable nutrients would be better spent balancing your energy, mood and hormones.
According to the late nutrition expert Dr Abram Hoffer, 'Modern diets are designed to appeal to the senses. Modern food bears little relationship to our physiological needs. Modern high tech-food processing has robbed us of the use of our senses in determining whether a food is or is not good for us.'
It is only recently that it has become necessary to educate ourselves about the composition of food. Our ancestors learned very effectively which foods were safe to eat using trial and error. Foods that were bland, salty or sweet were preferred and, as a rule, are not poisonous. These were balanced whole foods needed to maintain health. Today, our food supplies have been manipulated in such a way that we no longer recognise what is and what is not a healthy food.
The Process of Detoxification
The body has to expend a lot of energy detoxifying - in other words cleansing from the body - every man-made chemical, pollutant or inappropriate food that goes into it. Yet every process in the body, especially detoxification, depends on nutrients such as amino acids, vitamins and minerals, which come from the foods we eat. The problem with man-made chemicals, pollutants and inappropriate foods is that they either do not supply any nutrients or may require even more to detoxify them than they provided in the first place. Combined with poor quality food choices, this leads to ever-increasing nutritional depletion and impaired detoxification potential.
This is particularly concerning because used-up hormones and derivatives of hormones also have to be detoxified, as do the hormone-like substances we inadvertently take in from pesticides, plastics, industrial pollutants and detergents residues. If they are not adequately detoxified, imbalances such as oestrogen dominance are created. Furthermore, we now know that even small amounts of oestrogen derivatives (also called oestrogen metabolites) can be quite toxic if they accumulate because of poor detoxification. (However, it is now possible to test for these, and a nutritional therapist might recommend such a test depending on your symptoms.)
Patrick Holford
- Balance Your Hormones
