We have all heard that “what” we eat is important.  But, do we really know, and appreciate, why this is the case?  The implications of our food go far beyond the “four food groups,” food labels, and “food pyramids;” deeper than being paleo, vegan, or an intermittent faster.

Fad diets have reduced food down to calories, fat grams, or points.  Instead of consulting our common sense, we pay attention to the latest guru telling us what is “bad” and what is “good.”  The truth is that all whole and natural food is inherently good.  God has graced this planet with an abundance of living things not only to keep us alive, but to thrive!

We have allowed science to drive the culture of our food and how it is applied to the body much in the same way it has driven medicine.  Science has always looked at nature through the lens of breaking it down to better understand it. 

When we isolate compounds in order to better understand their effects on the body, it is, without a doubt, valuable information.  However, the pieces are rarely, if ever, put back together and appreciated in its completeness.  

It is paramount to understand how all of the compounds from our food work together.  Even more important is how one organism in its entirety, say an orange, interacts with our body and expresses vitality in us.

For example, take the health benefits of supplemental vitamin C (ascorbic acid).  It was first known for its ability to tackle scurvy.  However, the man that discovered ascorbic acid, Albert Szent-Gyorgi, found that scurvy was actually treated by taking the whole food in which vitamin C was found.  In this case, it was paprika and organ meats.

Why is this the case?

When we isolate pieces of nature, extract or synthesize them, and apply them to the body, they become no different than any other chemical.  They lose their essence, their soul.  For vitamin C, ascorbic acid is only a chemical by itself.  When eaten in its whole food form, ascorbic acid sits in the good company of other cofactors (rutin, bioflavonoids, et al). 

Mega doses of vitamin C have many therapeutic applications.  But, this is just a violin playing by itself.  The music can be beautiful and moving, but imagine the depth when another violin, a viola, and a cello are added.  The music is exponentially better!  So, too, is our food when we grow, cook, eat, share, and enjoy it with gratitude while adding in the benefit of supplementation.

Eat the Sun

As far as sustenance goes, all living things either eat sunlight, or eat something that eats sunlight, or eat something that eats something that eats sunlight. 

Follow that?  No?  Me neither.  Try this:

All life depends upon light from the sun.  Plants bask in the sun’s light all day, “eating” it for fuel and pooping oxygen.  Through this process, plant chemicals (phytonutrients) are made.  This description is not quite as detailed (i.e. boring) as a photosynthesis lecture from high school, but it serves for the purpose of this article.

When light is refracted, we see all seven colors (wavelengths) that make up visible light.  Since plants eat light, we see all seven colors represented in the foods we eat.  Thus, the refrain from food savvy doctors and persistent moms everywhere: “eat the rainbow.”

Each color family of phytonutrients has a different action on the body.  If we miss out on several colors, we miss out on detoxification, optimal gut function, crucial health benefits for our immune system, and so on.  It is far better for us to err on the side of diversity and quality than it is on quantity.  In other words, eating every color of plants each day is far more beneficial to your health than eating large amounts of one or two colors.

Living Beings Need Living Food

Everything living must eat living food in order to stay alive.  Plants eat sunlight, animals eat plants or other animals that eat plants, and we eat plants and animals.  Therefore, all of the energy derived from food comes from the sun’s UV light. 

Everything in this universe is also in motion.  Electrons cannot just sit still; rather they dance about the atoms that make up everything.  A vibration chain reaction goes on beginning with the sun’s electromagnetic energy, to the plant, to its phytochemicals, to us. 

Think of the vibrations from each phytonutrient as the tuning forks that bring every fiber of our being into balance.  It is this leverage that each thing we impale on our fork can impart information to our body.

Energy is transferred from sun’s light in addition to all the environmental factors in which the plant grows (i.e. trace minerals and bacteria in the soil, drought).  This then factors into the plant’s unique phytochemical profile.

While the advances and findings science has afforded us have been illuminating and fascinating, what has been done with these findings has not necessarily helped our health.  Scientists have either applied these compounds by themselves to illicit healing or they have synthesized the compounds in an effort to one-up nature.  There is a synergy in nature that humans can neither duplicate nor improve upon.

By deconstructing our food into its individual building blocks and chemical compounds, we lose the context in which all of these molecules are woven together.

What escapes many of us is that the “how’s,” “why’s,” “when’s,” and “who’s” of eating are just as important.  Where our food comes from, how it’s prepared, and with whom we share it are just a few factors in the quantum message that food has for our mind, body, and spirit.

Food Strikes a Chord with our DNA

Our food and our meals send signals to our cells to interact with our very DNA.  Think of our food as the artist, Bryan Adams, singing the power ballad (Everything I Do) I Do It for You to our genes.  Just like Bryan Adams would die for the love of his life, the living organisms of our food die for us at each and every meal.  They transfer all the knowledge that they have amassed and with that, happily massage our genome.

Food isn’t just in one end and out the other, giving us energy and making us feel good, sleepy, gassy, sassy, or radiant.  When we bring it into our body, cascades upon cascades of events happen.  All of these events affect our mind, body, and spirit in a helpful or hurtful way, depending upon the food and the context in which it was eaten.  Our food has the power of information! 

Information means, “to shape, form.”  Food has the ability to give directions to our body.  The food we eat directly connects to our DNA with the unique ability to turn vital genes on or off.

This revelation has ushered in the fields of nutrigenomics and nutritional genomics.  Nutrigenomics studies the role of specific nutrients from our food, their interaction with certain genes, and how this expresses health or disease.  Nutritional genomics looks at the genome of a patient and determines specific nutrients of focus in order to derive maximum benefit from diet.

What the plant “learned” from growing in its own environment gets taken up in our body and imparts its wisdom to us.  What stressed the plant then helps us adapt to stress, what the plant made for its immune system will strengthen ours.

Eating these compounds with their inherent information and their ability to make our body stronger is called xenohormesis.  Putting it another way, xenohormesis is when nature stresses out a plant it makes a bevy of lovely compounds.  We then eat these plants and these plant stress compounds (or phytonutrients) whisper to our DNA, our book of life.  Our DNA, being the foundation and source of information our body needs to live, then writes good stories in our book of life.

Our taste buds are even programmed to know this!  Wines and strawberries taste better when they were cultivated in hardscrabble areas.¹  What didn’t kill them made them stronger.  To which, we stand to benefit greatly.  The same can be said when the plant was threatened by fungal, viral, or bacterial attack.²  Why not add this bug-busting information to the ranks of our immune system army?

Whether you are in the fight for your life from a chronic condition or just trying to fight off the aging process, you must look to the information and support stored up in your food.  You may not be able to transform the sun’s ray directly into energy, but you are still desperately dependent upon light to live.

Stay tuned for our upcoming video Checklist For Getting The Most From Your Meals and make sure that you’re highlighting every bit of information from your food!

1. Cell Stress Chaperones. 2010 Nov; 15(6): 761–770.

2. J Agric Food Chem. 2010 Jan 13;58(1):650-4.