We Are What We Eat
   The ancients exclaimed. They recognized that lungs exist to breathe in air to sustain life. They knew that the skin exists primarily to protect us from our environment though it absorbs many materials applied to it. Most importantly, they understood the role of the bowel in health and disease. They seemed to understand that the bowel is the primary interface between the body innards and the environment around it. All other body organs exist and function to facilitate conversion of food energy to other forms of energy necessary for life. Diseases are rooted in the bowel, they pronounced, in more than one way.
   
    The ancients had much intuitive wisdom which we have turned our backs on. Rarely do we understand what we eat. Rarely do we attend to what happens to our food in the bowel. Rarely do we understand how the bowel responds to the food we put into it. Rarely do we recognize the relationship between what we eat and how we feel. When we fall ill, rarely do we attempt to link food with illness.

We Are What We Do Not Excrete
   Someone, afflicted with coprolalia, cried out, trying to translate the intuitive wisdom of the ancients into the contemporary vernacular.

We Are What We Absorb
   We may say when we recognize the many threats to proper digestion and absorption of food material which we face today. Our bowel ecology is being threatened in many ways. With each meal, we get a bolus of pesticides, herbicides, preservatives and antibiotics. Toxic chemicals and heavy metals invade our biology every day. Our digestive enzymes are inactivated. Essential minerals, the life support of digestive enzymes, are often deficient. The local bowel immune system weakens. The gut becomes leaky and fails to keep out undigested foods, undesirable macromolecules and viruses, bacteria, yeast and parasites. The problems of digestion and absorption are interrelated and feed upon the other.

We Are What Our Plasma Membranes Are
   We could say this to continue with this path of reasoning. After all, more important than absorption is how food molecules are used by plasma membranes (these membranes control all molecular events within the cells and in the cellular organelles, the tiniest structures within the cells).

We Are What Our Molecular Bioavailability Is
   We may pursue this line of reasoning further. After all, molecules mean something only when they can function. Molecular function, in essence, is a matter of their availability in the metabolic molecular pathways.

    But all this trivializes the intuitive wisdom of the ancients. Few things characterize our age more than complete dissociation between what we think we eat and what we believe the response of our bodies to our food is. The problem of our time is this: We have ceased to observe. What we lack is the capacity to observe the essential relatedness between our food and us, between what we eat and how we feel, between our patterns of eating and patterns of illness. The ancients did not have to confront as many assaults on their biology as we do today. If their external environment had been as devastated as ours, if their internal environment was as stressed and as polluted as ours, and if they had been as allergic to foods and as sensitive to chemicals as we are, they would most assuredly have exclaimed, "We are what we observe."

TWO BASIC OBSERVATIONS

    The ancients made two basic observations about human metabolism for which our nutrition and dieting experts, it seems to me, do not have much respect. I suspect this is so because these insights run counter to the profitability goals of our experts.

    First, the ancients knew that metabolism can be slowed down by fasting (the ancient equivalent of modern dieting). They knew and expounded the need for this during their periods of reflection, meditation, prayer and silence.

    Second, the ancients knew that metabolism can be accelerated by eating and with physical activity. Food fuels the furnace of human metabolism and exercise stokes its fire. Both truths are self-evident. All we have to do is to test them by observing the changes they produce.

    Now consider what our dieting experts are advising us. They recommend dieting which down-regulates our catabolic enzymes (slows down the furnace). Or they recommend that we limit ourselves to their packaged foods. Or they advise us to ignore the diversity of foods in Nature and limit ourselves to one or two foods of their whims. Our dieting experts never ask us to observe the effects of their packaged diets on our total health for the whole life span.