FUEL UP?

July 15th, 2018

Here is a different way to look at food and nutrition.

Often we say ‘gotta fuel up!’.

As though our bodies are like cars or planes that have a gas tank designed to hold one uniform ingredient.

Imagine a car that could repair itself. 

Would you be interested?  No more outrageous and incomprehensible bills from the mechanic.

The tradeoff here would be that the car can’t repair itself from gasoline alone.  It needs metal components of all sorts of varieties to be incorporated in all sorts of special places.  So the ‘gas tank’ needs to be filled with gasoline and tools and parts.

This is a better analogy for human nutrition. 

When we eat, we aren’t just fueling up,

we are tooling up.

Trillions of places in the body are waiting on the body’s own Amazon Prime infrastructure to deliver parts to fix and improve things, and it’s also waiting for the tools to make those repairs.

But without the right piece or part delivered, what happens? 

Everyone has had the frustrating experience that happens in every work environment:  being expected to perform and produce a particular result without the proper tools and resources.

Sometimes our ingenuity and endurance are enough to pull it off.

But would you want your neurologist to operate without the proper resources and just wing it with ingenuity and endurance?

Probably not.

The body has a built-in cardiologist, dermatologist, endocrinologist, and many more…even a therapist.

But without the proper resources, how can these bodily entities perform?  Without the right tools and resources and fuel, their abilities begin to collapse, and we then seek the professionals who have dedicated their lives to understanding these systems.

What do these resources, tools and fuel look like? 

It does not look like a donut.

Of course, the field of nutrition isn’t a real science because it’s so complex it’s impossible for a single person to have a full command of all the areas of knowledge and specialization that would be required.  In the same way that general practitioners only have a hazy understanding of what might be going on and so then refer someone to a specialist, the world of nutrition would require the same vast army of specialists. 

That being said, some things are pretty obvious.

 If we give the topic some of that precious thoughtful PAUSE, there are things we can figure out.  There is progress we can make. 

A steady and consistent habit of curiosity and experimentation would probably be the best strategy for making real strides in order to figure out what nutrition would be best for our own unique body.

Considering all of the documentaries on this subject, it can even be entertaining to learn.

In thinking about the future, and our health,

Will we simply ‘FUEL UP!’  and risk the expensive and even traumatic experience of the medical establishment rabbit hole?  Or can we think about it backwards?  Can we see that buying the more expensive, healthier food is actually investing in health on a day-to-day basis, as opposed to saving that money for heavy medical bills that will eventually come down the line when our poor day-to-day nutrition finally catches up with us.

The question is even simpler: will we give the body the tools it needs to perform at it’s best?

This episode referenced Episode 23: Pause.  If you’d like to explore the reference further, I suggest checking out that episode next.