HOW TO GET LEAN N’ MEAN, PART III: The Critical Role of Good Digestion in Overall Health, Performance, and Longevity
Digesting Garbage: Forcing Slop That Passes as “Food” into Your Poor Body
Again, my workout and nutrition posts here on American Partisan are about the simplification of all things health and fitness, so right off the bat, let’s simplify all of nutrition by stating the following: “junk in, junk out; quality in, quality out”. That is, if you put low-quality, impurity-filled fuel into any machine, you get poor performance and a short life from the machine; if you put superior-grade fuel into a machine, you get top-level performance and more longevity from the machine. Seems pretty straightforward and self-explanatory, right?
Think about a complex machine composed of multiple working parts like a car, which needs engine oil and gasoline as two of its primary fluid inputs. If you owned a high-performance car like a Lamborghini, would you use the cheapo brand engine oil and low-grade gasoline? No way! You’d want your awesome automobile to perform well and last for a long time, and so you’d probably spend whatever extra money on oil and fuel that it took to assure that your high-powered speed machine could perform to specifications and be around for many years of fun riding and display.
Well, your body is a far more advanced, precious, and high performance machine than any man-made machine could ever be – your body is truly a gift from God that can even maintain itself just fine (given the right inputs and activities). This gift from God clearly needs to be treated with the proper care, and yet so few people do that. In order to realize the high performance your body is actually capable of and that is your birthright, you must provide it with the proper, high-quality substances it needs to thrive, while staying clear of substances that harm it. This is where good, proper nutrition comes in.
Misconceptions and myths about “good nutrition” are shockingly common and numerous in the U.S. Here are my Top 5 Myths of Good Nutrition that have been so repeated in popular culture as to be considered gospel by now:
- “Breakfast it the most important meal of the day.” (Pure propaganda for the breakfast food industry; covered at length in my previous post)
- “Supplementing isn’t necessary, since food has all the nutrients the body needs.” (Modern food production leaves even raw foods with less nutrition, a reality that necessitates supplementation; we’ll get into more depth about supplements in an upcoming, dedicated post in this series)
- “A low-fat, low-sodium diet is good for the heart and for health.” (Salt is a crucial nutrient, and blood pressure gets elevated for other reasons, not for excess of salt; fat is a vital nutrient that the body needs for countless applications, so a low-fat diet is a terrible idea)
- “Small meals 5 – 6 times a day works best for people interested in eating right.” (Bad for blood sugar stability and excessively energy-intensive, digestively, to eat multiple times a day)
- “Whole grains are good for you.” (grains are sugar, and sugar… is bad, m’kay?)
So many stupid ideas on what makes for “good nutrition” swirl around these days that the term itself is meaningless by now, and “We the People” are paying for it with our health and lives; U.S. rates of disease and obesity are going through the roof. Obviously, a lack of exercise has some connection to this trend, but Americans seem to be totally overlooking the so-called 800 lb. elephant in the room – the food connection to metabolic disease and obesity, a connection that has everything to do with the Top 5 Myths above.
For the current purposes of empowering American Partisans, though, let’s focus not on long-term metabolic disease formation just yet, but rather, on the less severe connection between food and not looking and/or feeling very good in the immediate sense. This is the situation in which many people may find themselves at some point during their adulthood, and it is usually this group of adults who aren’t looking or feeling their best and wants to “lose weight and get in shape”. That being said, it should also be understood that what starts out as “not looking and/or feeling good” will, much of the time, evolve into “obese and/or chronically ill”. As such, the American Partisan should sincerely consider a genuine change of lifestyle where applicable or needed, with a special focus on good nutrition. In this particular way, the Partisan can avoid the associated problems of both the early (being overweight and low-energy) and later stages (obesity; chronic metabolic disease) of looking/feeling poorly.
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Now, Seriously. How’s YOUR Nutrition?
Ask yourself, “how do I feel?”. This simple question is the most important thing to ask yourself as far as your health is concerned, and the answer is directly linked to how you eat – the old cliché, “you are what you eat” is spot on.
Here are some other questions worth considering, all of which are reflections of “how you feel”:
- Do you feel run down and/or mentally cloudy?
- Are you hungry often? Experiencing cravings?
- Is your bodyweight trending upwards?
- Is your digestion smooth and symptom-free?
- Do you suffer from any ongoing inflammation or degenerative conditions/diseases?
If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above, then it’s really time to get serious about cleaning up your nutrition. True overall health and longevity depend almost totally on proper digestive activity and a stable metabolism which, in turn, both require good nutrition.
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The Digestive Process – Not to Be Taken Lightly
Digestion, in ultra-simplified terms, is the process in which the body orally takes in pieces of food (called “macronutrients”; “macro” = large) and breaks them up into smaller, more manageable elements from which any nutrients present in the food can be more easily extracted and used by the body. The digestive process requires a series of dedicated organs to break down foods into component parts and remove resultant waste products. Digestion also requires the production of specialized juices (like hydrochloric acid in the stomach and bile from the liver) together with chemical agents (called “enzymes”) to assist in the breakdown and extraction of nutrients from your food.