Update: 21 November 2024
Author: Julie Casper, C. Ac.
You are NOT what you eat. You're what you digest.
Suboptimal diets are responsible for one in five (22%) adult deaths globally. Since 1980, the obesity rate has doubled in 73 countries and increased in 113 others. Current food systems are driving diet-related diseases in two directions, contributing to a coexistence of undernutrition and obesity. The result is varying forms of malnutrition everywhere. 1
Diet is the leading cause of death in the United States. But it's not how much we're eating – Americans consume fewer calories now than in 2003. It's what we're eating. Draining this poison from our trillion-dollar food system is not going to happen quickly or easily. Every link in the chain, from factory farms to school lunches, is dominated by a Mars or a Monsanto or a McDonald's, each working tirelessly to lower its costs and raise its profits. Michael Hobbes
No matter how ‘good,’ or ‘bad,’ how well balanced, or well prepared a diet is, many people simply are not metabolizing the nutrition from their food.
It is your metabolic status, essential mineral balance, and toxic burden, that determines how much nutrition is being utilized from your food. hTMA can correct deranged mineral imbalances, improve metabolism, and safely detoxify by replacing heavy-metals with preferred nutrient elements.
Having a robust metabolism ensures that the time and money you invest in your nutrition is well spent. Is your digestion compromised?
The terms diet and nutrition are frequently used interchangeably. This is incorrect and it is important to understand the distinction between the two.
Diet relates to the consumption of foods, and nutrition describes the nutrients obtained from the diet. This difference is important to understand because the presence of nutrients in the diet does not necessarily insure their absorption, retention, or utilization. And there are factors other than diet that affect your nutrition. For example, the ability to respond to and recover from stress and toxic body-burden. Let's look a little closer at how stress and toxicity can impact your nutrition.
The neuroendocrine system consists of the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, and overlaps the nervous and endocrine systems. It is primarily responsible for neural modulation of endocrine function. The endocrine system consists of numerous glands throughout the body that produce and secrete hormones of diverse chemical structure, including peptides, steroids, and neuroamines. Collectively, hormones regulate many physiological processes. The neuroendocrine system is influential in the absorption, excretion, transport, utilization and storage of nutrients. Depending on which neuroendocrine group is dominant (sympathetic or parasympathetic), the body will deplete or build up different minerals within the tissues.
The influence of the endocrine glands on mineral metabolism has a direct effect on tissue mineral patterns, producing deficiencies, imbalances and excess accumulation. Correct functioning of the neuroendocrine system requires correct levels and ratios of minerals, vitamins, proteins, fats and carbohydrates. hTMA directed nutritional therapy can reverse or prevent metabolic disturbances caused by one neuroendocrine group dominating the other.
The neuroendocrine state effects the retention of toxic metals also. For instance, sympathetic dominance will enhance the retention of toxic lead, and parasympathetic dominance can enhance the retention of toxic cadmium and mercury.
Back to TopThe ratio of your tissue levels of toxic metals relative to the protective nutrient minerals can indicate harm being done by these toxins. Heavy metals (e.g., mercury, lead, cadmium) interfere with normal metabolic processes due to their ability to displace nutritional minerals and poison enzyme functions by their attachment to proteins. In today's environment, everyone is persistently exposed to toxic heavy metals, and has measurable levels within their bodies. The ratio of the protective nutrient mineral relative to the toxic heavy metal is an important quantification to appreciate.
In electronic networks, cascading failures usually begin when just one part of a system fails. When this occurs, nearby nodes must then take up the slack for the failed component. This overloads these nodes, causing them to fail as well, prompting additional nodes to fail in a vicious cycle.
In biology, every single mineral effects every other mineral. When a single mineral level is imbalanced, all minerals (and mineral ratios) are affected, starting a massive ‘multiple-vehicle collision’ of imbalances. Often people say, "I'm just taking a little magnesium," or a little zinc, or whatever. If people only knew the harm they could cause by taking even one mineral supplement they did not need, or even taking the right supplement in excessive quantities — they would never take them in the first place.
Let's consider iron, for example. Many women are told to take iron tablets because they are tired (or ‘anemic’). Unfortunately, if iron is not taken in the correct ratio with other minerals, it exacerbates fatigue. Everyone's mineral profile is distinct. The amount of iron (and other minerals) needed for more energy for one person, may be completely different than what is needed for the next person.
Mineral imbalances like those shown above are typical. The cascading failure could easily be caused by a single mineral level which has become too high in relation to the others. So, now you can see what can happen when you take "just a little iron" to get your energy up. If a person has 21 minerals that are out of balance, for instance, it is a complicated process to correct. Each mineral has a synergistic effect on all of the other minerals. Because no mineral works in isolation, taking a supplement to address a symptom, or because it is "recommended by experts," can actually result in biochemical chaos (to one degree or another).
Back to TopNutritional therapeutics has largely been directed toward the recognition and correction of nutritional deficiencies. However, it is now becoming more evident that a loss of homeostatic equilibrium between nutrients can also have an adverse impact upon health. A loss of this vital balance can lead to sub-clinical nutritional disturbances, which outnumber overt deficiency syndromes by ten to one.
Determining nutritional interrelationships is much more important than knowing mineral levels alone. From a global standpoint, although dietary deficiency is at the more serious end of the spectrum, the opposite end, dietary excess and aberrations contribute to the burden of disease.Vitale
Although nutrients are generally synergistic, in that they work in concert to maintain normal metabolic activity and health, imbalances between nutrients, for whatever reason, can disrupt this synergistic relationship, producing relative excesses and deficiencies. In the face of a nutrient deficiency, a normally synergistic nutrient can become dominant and eventually lead to antagonism of another nutrient through competition on an absorptive level, (intestinal absorption) and a metabolic level (displacement) within cells, tissues and organs.
Antagonistic relationships between nutrient minerals can have an effect on biological activity. Mineral wheel diagrams illustrating the antagonistic relationships were developed by David L. Watts, Ph.D., Director of Research for Trace Elements. The research was published between 1988 and 1994 in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine.
The Confined Animal Feedlot Operation (CAFO) is a commercial agricultural model developed for the purposes of increasing food production efficiency, and owner profits.
CAFO animals are terrorized, living in a state of perpetual fear. An unnatural nightmare, they are literally confined, miserable and sick. Profits are maximized by minimizing input costs (food, housing, labor). CAFO animal feed contains many harmful additives. These include pharmaceutical products (e.g., antibiotics, hormones, vaccines, etc.), toxic arsenic is often added to promote faster growth, and industrially processed grain that includes residues from processing machinery and ‘filler‘ materials used in the final product. Industrial-ag relies on toxic pesticides, herbicides and fungicides to grow grain. Irrigation water is often concentrated with toxicity. Industrial-ag grain contains glyphosate. Glyphosate is largely responsible for the current pandemic of chronic antibiotic exposure, among other health problems.
There are unsettling similarities between CAFOs and the modern human experience.
We love our sweets, it's genetic! For all of human history we had very limited access to sweets. In season fruit, or an occasional (painful) raid of a bee's nest was about it. Because of its overwhelming presence today in industrially processed food and drink products, sugar has become culturally normalized. Regrettably, sugary products are heavily marketed to those most vulnerable, our children. Children are easy targets, they are psychologically incapable of recognizing that they are being programmed for a life of sugar related health problems — including addictions.
Sugar laced foods are so common that people are unaware of the seriousness of the health threats. The list of debilitating health conditions related to sugar consumption is a very long one, including heart disease, obesity and hypertension. A major factor that has kept us in the dark about sugar's detrimental impacts is the aggressive role that the food industry has played in keeping it that way. Food corporations deploy abhorrent tactics similar to those used by the tobacco industry to downplay the harm caused by their sugar-laden products.
Spinning Food exposes how big agriculture and the food industry control public opinion regarding the harmful impacts of toxic, chemical dependent, unsustainable agricultural operations, and how they will stop at nothing to misdirect the public about the environmental and health benefits of organic food.
As our Friends of the Earth so thoroughly explain in Spinning Food, we need to be careful about blindly trusting research, and especially how media reports on it. Journalists are not scientists or medical professionals, so they frequently get it wrong, intentionally or not.
A study conducted by Stanford's University's Department of Medicine (and reported widely in the media), suggests "there is little evidence of health benefits from organic foods." However, if you actually read the report you might think otherwise. Of course almost no one reads these things, after all it's "research" (boring), and scientists are infallible, and unbiased — right? For example, the excerpt below is from the report.
For their study, researchers sifted through thousands of papers and identified 237 (they decided were) most relevant to analyze. Those included 17 studies of populations consuming organic and conventional diets, and 223 studies that compared either the nutrient levels or the bacterial, fungal or pesticide contamination of various products (fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, milk, poultry, and eggs) grown organically and conventionally. There were no long-term studies of health outcomes. While researchers found that organic produce had a 30 percent lower risk of pesticide contamination than conventional fruits and vegetables, they said that organic foods are not necessarily 100 percent free of pesticides. What's more, the researchers noted the pesticide levels of all foods generally fell within the allowable safety limits.
What this meta-analysis did not take into account is that most people have compromised digestion. Many people are simply not metabolizing the nutrition from their food. So of course organic won't make much difference. The researchers did not analyze the differences between individual toxic body burdens. They did not analyze metabolic status of study subjects. And they did not compare mineral levels and ratios of test subject's body tissues.
Back to TopNutritional Balancing.org is a free, non-commercial, public information resource. The information provided is for educational purposes only and should not be used as a substitute for the advice of a physician or other licensed health practitioner. The information provided is not intended to be used for diagnosis, treatment or prescription for any condition, physical or emotional, real or imagined. Statements contained herein have not been evaluated by the FDA.
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