Ideal food for humans. What does that mean and who gets to decide the ideal
food for humans? Coming right up
Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly master
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The ideal food for humans what is that who gets to decide? Well lately it seems
like people put more faith in opinions in the dash diet and the Mediterranean diet
and the Paleo diet and so forth but who is right and how can we decide? Well in
this case there is only one judge and the one who decides is your DNA why does
that matter what is DNA well DNA codes for proteins you have DNA in every cell
and what it does it is a code it's a blueprint for how to make certain
proteins and some of those proteins that your body makes are called
enzymes so DNA makes proteins some of the proteins are enzymes and enzymes
they break down your food so everything that you put into your body it will go
straight through with absolutely no change unless you had enzymes just
because you put it in your mouth doesn't mean that it becomes tissue in your body
the process that makes that transition is initiated it's it's made happen by
enzymes and if you put something in your body that your enzymes don't recognize
if there's not an exact fit if that food is foreign to your enzymes if you don't
have the right enzymes to break down that food if the food isn't presented in
the right combination for your enzymes then that food is foreign your body
doesn't know what to do with it our DNA is unchanged
for the last 250 years so all the people who have lived during the last 250 years
are sharing the same DNA it hasn't changed so let's look at what
happened this little orange square right here represents 10,000 years so we take
this little piece and we blow it up and this is now 10,000 years that's how long
we have had agriculture that's how long we have had any kind of exposure to
grain and it doesn't mean we had the same kind of grains that we have today
back then there were two grains that were called emmer and einkorn the first
ancient wheats and we didn't have corn and we didn't have rice and we didn't
have a rye or any of those things so for 10,000 years we started that's how long
we've had any kind of grain we started doing agriculture and then once we break
this down so relative to this 10,000 now we have this little blip which is a
hundred and fifty years and that is how long we've had any sort of food
processing and that means that we have taken the grain apart we taken the food
apart we have taken certain pieces out so now that we gave the food to your
enzymes it's different because it's not presented in the same combinations in
the same proportions anymore and 150 years coca-cola wasn't even around there
was no fast food there was no Wonder Bread there was none
of the modern processed foods that we recognize that makes up the majority of
what people eat today and then we break it down further and this tiny little
sliver is 50 years that's how long we've had an abundance of processed foods
that's the time where white sugar white flour has become the majority of what
we're eating so looking at this perspective if this is how long if
250,000 years is how long our DNA has remained unchanged
changed that's tens of thousands of generations and here we have two
generations and there is absolutely no chance that our DNA has had the chance
to adapt to those modern foods that means all those modern foods the
majority of what we eat is an experiment it's a foreign invader our bodies do not
know what to do with that food so one example I like to give to bring this in
perspective is you go to your average grocery store and there's about 50,000
shelf items up there and if you go through the store you ask yourself how
many of these items existed prior to 10,000 years so if it existed prior to
10,000 years that means it existed somewhere around here that means it
probably was available for our ancestors to get adapted to and if it didn't exist
then it's foreign and if you go through the average grocery store you'll
probably find maybe a hundred items there's the meat section there's some
chicken there's some fish there's some vegetables a few berries and some fruit
maybe a few nuts but everything else everything made from sugar and high
fructose corn starch and flour and artificial sweeteners and preservatives
and color enhancers and flavor enhancers your body has never seen those things if
we didn't have it then it doesn't absolutely mean that it's a bad idea but
it means it's probably a bad idea so what did we have available back then
what did our ancestors have well pretty much prior to agriculture it was
anything that you could catch dig up or pick so something you could catch would
be meat or fish and the meat was not jerky with msg and preservatives and
high fructose corn syrup and all those sugar
if you could dig it up might have been some potatoes or some version of a
potato or a sweet potato or a rutabaga or a parsnip
it wasn't potato chips it wasn't french fries it wasn't these reconstituted
puffy things that we buy in the cellophane bags even though they say
they're made out of vegetables it's not a root or a tuber or a vegetable anymore
something you could pick those would be fruits and vegetables and does not mean
a fruit roll-up it does not mean strawberry jam it does not mean a
low-fat pop-tart those are not foods they were not available if we change
them to that degree they become foreign to our bodies again and another thing to
keep in mind was that most of these things were probably seasonal that I'm
not going to get into the argument whether we're supposed to be carnivores
or vegetarian I think we need to eat some of everything but we need to keep
in mind that most things were seasonal so even if we had access to fruits and
vegetables it probably wasn't year-round it was probably more likely to have
year-round access to meat and fish and the other thing to understand is whole
foods that everything that we eat needs to be eaten as close as possible to its
natural state if a potato was available it should
still look like potato it shouldn't look like potato chips or vodka because even
though they're made from potato they're not the same thing same thing with meat
same thing with vegetables same thing with anything that you eat the closer it
is to its original form the more enzymes the more nutrition the more vitamin
complexes it retains the more naturally everything is combined so next time that
someone presents you the ideal diet when some agency has an official boat and
proclaims their so that diet as the official and optimum diet for humans ask
yourself these questions was it around do we have
the enzymes to break it down does it fit this model because this
model is what your DNA recognizes and last year the DASH diet was proclaimed
as the best diet and it has 50% recommends 50% of its calories from
grains that it is very very questionable if that is a suitable human food so keep
this in mind and please share this video with as many people as you can if we
start understanding the bigger picture of health if we start understanding
physiology then we can all help each other get healthier and ask for the
right foods and have producers produce the right foods for us if you're new to
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thanks for watching