TRYING2️⃣UNDERSTAND

Do You Prefer to Decompose or Demolish Your Food?

That seems like an undoubtedly trivial question, but is it? Depends on whether you want to boost or proof-test your health.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinion after reading my arguments.

Decomposition or destruction of nutrients?

I did some research on the subject from a systems-thinking perspective. I believe some of the nutritional basics are grossly distorted and misunderstood.

The question I would start with here is who to listen to and whether they have a possible conflict of interest.

Basically, I could generalize as follows — because we are afraid of bacteria and other microbes, we prefer to ‘thermally process’ our food.

This, on closer reflection, seems to be one of the biggest nutritional fallacies. Why do many studies report signs of malnutrition in the population despite the obesity ‘epidemic’?

If we had dug into details on that generalized statement, the malnutrition mentioned above would make much more sense.

Let’s try to elaborate on the confusion with microbes. Everything I am about to write is my personal thinking based on a survey of the scientific literature available on the web.

I will make some informed basic assumptions below:

1. Microbes

are scavengers. They seek to decompose garbage, dead cells, and toxic substances. They break down substances into simpler ones that are more easily used by other organisms in the ecosystem to generate energy.

They are not toxic or dangerous; only their feces from processing ‘garbage’ are. Toxicity, therefore, depends on the waste they process. The waste you have produced, not them.

2. ‘Thermal processing’

of food means overheating, drying, and burning. It damages and destroys microbes, along with most nutrients that are not thermally stable and thus no longer edible.

Processed food is damaged, hardened, and burnt. That makes it unusable, much harder to degrade, and even more toxic.

In addition, the food is left with a bunch of killed microbes. Those microbes (useless waste) need other cleaning organisms to break them down and remove them from the body.

3. Decomposing food

in the body means the breakdown or use of substances to generate energy. This requires certain forms of microbes in the gut. Gut flora can break down or utilize particular forms of materials for energy generation.

This is essentially the same process that, in the presence of specific microbes, already starts outside the body. This means that, in point 2, we are destroying the same bacteria that can and already have begun to break down the substance.

4. Demolished nutrients

When such ‘thermally processed’ food is consumed, it is already depleted or nutrient-poor. As a result, we become even more hungry due to a lack of necessary nutrients, and we do not receive the nutrients our body needs.

Additionally, the body begins to deteriorate while damaged food or indigestible substances accumulate in certain body parts.

The irony is that, despite the weight gain, the body is starved of essential nutrients. It becomes a vicious circle, as we have to eat more and more to meet our body’s food needs, and we get hungrier and hungrier.

It takes specific microbes to break down certain substances. Not all are appropriate.

Hence specific microbes are required to break down specific foods. In the initial stages of the natural breakdown of those foods outside our body, we can find the exact specific microbes already starting to break down the substances in those foods.

What then is the benefit of ‘thermal processing’ of food? We damage our burned nutrients, destroy the necessary microbes and accumulate a lot of hard-to-digest, useless food and dead microbes in the body.

We then need even more micro-nutrients and energy to remove all that waste.

Takeaway

I am trying to provoke you to start using your own head. If that does not qualify as a decent takeaway, I am sorry — there is no takeaway for you.

DISCLAIMER:

I’m not trying to outsmart the experts in any given domain. I only want to test my systems-thinking skills and check how (much) the produced theories hold water in various topics.