The New Optimum Nutrition Bible

by Patrick Holford

  A supplement containing FOS will promote rapid multiplication, so you may not need so many as is suggested above. The same is true for microencapsulated or enterically coated supplements, which should be taken with food; otherwise, take supplements away from meals to minimize their destruction from gastric acid in the stomach (stomach acid will normally destroy a percentage of the bacteria you ingest—good and bad). Lactobacilli and Bacillus coagulans (formerly known as Lactobacillus sporogenes) are particularly resistant to stomach acid and are therefore a good choice as a supplement. Bacillus coagulans is especially effective at producing lactic acid, which is the primary way in which probiotics fight infection. Although not resident, Bacillus coagulans hangs around for a week or so doing good work.

  If you are taking probiotics therapeutically (for example, to reinoculate the digestive tract after antibiotics or as part of an anti-infection strategy, for instance, to kill off candidiasis), you may need three times the amount needed for general health promotion. Higher levels of probiotics and prebiotics such as FOS do sometimes result in increased flatulence, at least in the short term. This is not necessarily a bad sign—as less desirable organisms die off, symptoms sometimes get worse before they get better.

  Living food in action

  Every time you eat a combination of fresh, living foods, such as fruit and vegetables, you are giving yourself a cocktail of essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, antioxidants, enzymes, probiotics, and phytochemicals that work together synergistically to promote your health. The idea of separating out each ingredient and then treating it like a drug to cure a specific illness is not just impractical but nonsensical. The moral of this story is to eat foods that you can pick out of the ground or pluck from a tree.

  Good habits to develop to ensure that living foods, and the nutrients they contain, form a regular part of your diet

  Eat at least three pieces of fresh fruit a day.

  Have a salad as a major part of one meal each day.

  Eat frequently the many foods rich in antioxidants and phytochemicals, such as sweet potatoes, broccoli, watercress, peas, carrots, and berries.

  Eat a multicolored variety of foods, as each natural color contains different health-promoting phytochemicals.

  Eat whole foods, rather than refined or processed foods full of artificial chemicals.

  Eat as much raw food as possible. Steam food where you can, and fry as little as possible.

  Wherever possible, buy organic food. If this is not possible, peel or throw away outer leaves and wash to reduce pesticide residues.

  Buy fresh foods when you need them, rather than buying ahead and storing them. The longer you keep them, the more their nutrients are destroyed.

  Eat fermented foods such as yogurt, cottage cheese, miso, shoyu, sauerkraut, and sourdough bread, especially those cultured with lactobacillus or bifodobacteria.

  Take a probiotic supplement containing beneficial strains of bacteria as well as FOS.

  Supplement your diet with a synergistic collection of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other phytochemicals (see part 6).

  18

  Your Body Is 66 Percent Water

  It is an astonishing fact that the human body is basically two-thirds water. Without it most people are dead in four days. In normal circumstances, in twenty-four hours we lose 1.5 quarts of water in urine, 25.4 fl oz through the skin, 13.5 fl oz in the breath, and 5.1 fl oz in feces. That’s a total of 2.8 quarts a day.76 A simple equation would suggest that this is what you need to drink.

  It isn’t quite that simple, however. Firstly, the body makes water by metabolizing food, normally around 10.2 fl oz a day. Then there is the water in food itself, which normally provides around 1 quart a day. This totals 1.3 quarts, leaving the average person 1.5 quarts short on an average day. That’s the equivalent of six glasses of water.

  Why eight glasses is better

  Drinking a total of 1.5 quarts of water a day is really a minimum since, if it is hot or if you exercise, you will need more because you will sweat more. Also, drinking more is generally helpful for the kidneys. This is because many toxins, both those generated by the body and the ones that are consumed, are eliminated via the kidneys. By diluting the concentration of these toxins in the blood you give your kidneys an easier time, up to a point.

  In fact, it’s essential to ensure that enough fluid is available for the excretion of soluble minerals in the blood and nitrogenous waste material, especially from protein metabolism. The maximum intake from oral liquids should be that which the kidneys can reasonably excrete in twenty-four hours, and in adults this is around 2 quarts per day (2.45 to 2.7 fl oz/5 lbs body weight), according to research by S. M. Kleiner at the University of Washington, published in the Journal of the American Dietetics Association in 1999.77

  Contrary to popular opinion, drinking more water doesn’t leach minerals from the body according to mineral expert Dr. Neil Ward of the University of Surrey (England), who has never found any evidence of this or reason why it would happen.

  Why more than eight glasses is worse

  Drinking more than you need, which is around 1.5 to 2 quarts a day in normal circumstances, isn’t better for you, and may be worse. This is because too much water taxes the kidneys and can lead to overhydration. Taken to the extreme this can kill you. A man died recently after drinking ten quarts in a few hours, while almost every year somebody dies from drinking too much water while on Ecstasy, for fear of drinking too little. This drug, and others, disturbs the normal thirst reflex. Far more people die as a consequence of drinking too little.

  What happens if you don’t get enough?

  Water has many roles throughout the body other than flushing the kidneys, including dissolving minerals and acting as a delivery system, a lubricant, and a temperature regulator.

  Even very mild dehydration can lead to constipation, headaches, lethargy, and mental confusion, while increasing the risk of urinary tract infections and kidney stones. When just 1 percent of body fluids are lost, body temperature goes up and concentration becomes more difficult.

  The thirst mechanism kicks in when we’ve lost between 1 and 2 percent of body water. However, the thirst reflex is often mistaken for hunger. If we ignore it or mistake it for hunger, dehydration can continue to around 3 percent, where it seriously affects both mental and physical performance. Sports nutritionists have found that a 3 percent loss of body water results in an 8 percent loss in muscle strength.

  Dr. Batmanghelidj, author of Your Body’s Many Cries for Water, cites many other health problems resulting from chronic low-level dehydration, including gastric ulcers (water is needed for the mucosal lining of your stomach and digestive system to protect it from your digestive juices), joint pain (the discs and cartilage cushioning joints are dependent on their water content for proper functioning), asthma and allergies (concentrated blood reaching the lungs results in increased production of histamine), and many more conditions. After more than a decade of research, he confirms that we need a minimum of six to eight 8 oz. glasses of water per day.78

  How to tell how much water you need

  At first glance you’d think that thirst indicates only that you need more water. While this is obviously true in most circumstances, there are other factors that can trigger the thirst reflex. So if you’re constantly thirsty, it can mean that you don’t drink enough, but it could mean something else. The two most common reasons other than water deficiency are blood sugar problems and essential fat deficiency.

  People with diabetes, or borderline diabetes, are often thirsty. This is because their blood sugar levels are too high—in these cases, the body wants to dilute glucose in the blood, which can be toxic to cells, by drinking more. This is why very sweet drinks make you drink more. It wouldn’t surprise me if the sugared-drink industry hadn’t worked out the perfect balance here to keep you drinking all day long!

  The other reason for thirst is essential fat deficiency. Many people, especially childre
n, are deficient in essential fats from fish and seeds and their oils. Without the right fats, cells can’t maintain their right water balance, and excessive thirst can result. The solution, of course, is to eat more fish, seeds, and cold-pressed seed oils or to supplement the essential fats.

  Any combination of the symptoms below might help you become more in tune with your body’s cries for water.

  Are you prone to constipation?

  Are you often thirsty?

  Do you have joint problems?

  Do you feel tired?

  Are you having difficulty concentrating?

  Are you overheating?

  Do you have dry skin, mouth, or lips?

  Do you get frequent infections?

  Do you have dry, brittle hair?

  The other way to tell whether you need to drink more is by checking the color of your urine. If your urine is very strongly colored, then you’re not drinking enough. This simple gauge is, however, complicated by the fact that riboflavin (vitamin B2) makes the urine a fluorescent kind of yellow. This is different from dark yellow, once you get used to it. Ideally, your urine should be a light, straw-colored yellow. If, however, your urine is often clear, like water, you may be drinking too much and not taking in enough nutrients.

  Do tea and coffee count?

  Water-consumption advice almost always specifically discounts caffeinated beverages, but this is now being questioned and may need revising. Caffeine does cause a loss of water, but only a fraction of what you’re adding by drinking the beverage. In people who don’t regularly consume caffeine, for example, researchers say that a cup of coffee actually adds about two-thirds the amount of hydrating fluid that’s in a cup of water.

  Regular coffee and tea drinkers become accustomed to caffeine and lose little, if any, fluid. In a study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, researchers at the Center for Human Nutrition in Omaha, Nebraska, measured how different combinations of water, coffee, and caffeinated sodas affected the hydration status of eighteen healthy adults who drank caffeinated beverages routinely.79 “We found no significant differences at all,” said nutritionist Ann Grandjean, the study’s leading author. “The purpose of the study was to find out if caffeine is dehydrating in healthy people who are drinking normal amounts of it. It is not.”

  The same goes for tea, juice, milk, and caffeinated sodas: one glass provides about the same amount of hydrating fluid as a glass of water. The only common drinks that produce a net loss of fluids are those containing alcohol—and usually it takes more than one of those to cause noticeable dehydration, doctors say.

  I would still advise the consumption of pure filtered or bottled water in preference to tea, coffee, sugary drinks, and juice because these drinks have effects other than just hydrating you. They all disrupt your blood sugar balance; tea, coffee, and cola rob the body of minerals; and sugary drinks (including some juice drinks) provide calories but few nutrients, hindering an optimal nutrient intake, as well as potentially causing too-high concentrations of glucose in the blood.

  If you want hydration, go for water. If you don’t like water, try flavoring it with lemon, lime, ginger, mint, or herbal teas.

  What’s the best water?

  The best water to drink is natural mineral water, which contains significant amounts of minerals—for example, 60 to 100 mg of calcium in two quarts of water. This can be still or sparkling. Carbonation makes no difference to calcium absorption. However, fizzy drinks containing phosphorus can inhibit calcium absorption, as can drinks containing caffeine. A cola drink that contains both is therefore bad news. If you drink only pure water or distilled water, ensure that you are getting all the minerals you need from your diet and supplements. The majority of water filters cannot help but remove some of the good minerals along with the bad, so the same applies. Most important of all, whatever kind of water you drink, make sure you drink enough.

  In summary

  Drink the equivalent of eight glasses of water a day, as water, diluted juices, or caffeine-free drinks.

  Choose natural mineral water, pure water, or filtered tap water.

  19

  Food Combining—Facts and Fallacies

  Many people find that certain types or combinations of food do not suit them. Based on this observation and on his research into health and nutrition, in the 1930s Dr. Howard Hay devised a diet plan popularly known as “food combining,” which has helped millions of people toward better health. He recommended eating a healthy diet consistent with the optimum nutrition approach and formulated rules about which foods you can eat together. The key elements in Dr. Hay’s original theory were to eat “alkaline-forming foods,” to avoid refined and heavily processed foods, to eat fruit on its own, and not to mix protein-rich and carbohydrate-rich foods.

  Protein and carbohydrate are digested differently That is a fact. Carbohydrate digestion starts in the mouth when the digestive enzyme amylase, which is present in saliva, starts to act on the food you chew. Once you swallow food and it enters the relatively acid environment of the stomach, amylase stops working. Only when the food leaves the stomach, where the digestive environment becomes more alkaline, can the next wave of amylase enzymes, this time secreted into the small intestine from the pancreas, continue and complete the digestion of carbohydrate.

  Protein, on the other hand, is not digested in the mouth at all. It needs the acid environment of the stomach and may hang out there for three hours until all the complex proteins are broken down into smaller collections of amino acids known as peptides. This happens only in the stomach because it contains the high levels of hydrochloric acid needed to activate the protein-digesting enzyme pepsin. Once peptides leave the stomach, they meet peptidase enzymes, again from the pancreas, which break them down into individual amino acids, ready for absorption.

  The myth of the bean

  The simplistic view of food combining is that carbohydrate and protein foods should be separated because they are digested differently. The fact that eating certain kinds of beans produces flatulence is often quoted as a negative effect, because beans contain both protein and carbohydrate. However, it is now known that this is not the reason for beans’ boisterous reputation.

  Some beans contain proteins such as lectin, which cannot be digested by the enzymes in our digestive system, even when eaten alone. These proteins can, however, be digested by the bacteria that live in the large intestine. So when you eat beans you feed not only yourself but also these bacteria. After a good meal of lectin, these bacteria produce gas, hence the flatulence. It has got nothing to do with food combining. Many healthy cultures throughout the world have evolved to eat a diet in which beans or lentils are a staple food—but they suffer no digestive problems.

  Protein and carbohydrate—foods that fight?

  Of course, since items of food do not consist exclusively of either carbohydrate or protein, in practical terms separating them means not combining concentrated protein foods with concentrated starch foods. Meat is 50 percent protein and 0 percent carbohydrate. Potatoes are 8 percent protein and 90 percent carbohydrate. In between are beans, lentils, rice, wheat, and quinoa. So where exactly do you draw the line, if a line should be drawn at all?

  A brief excursion into our primitive past may solve the puzzle. The general consensus is that the human race has been eating a predominantly vegetarian diet for millions of years, with the occasional meal of meat or fish. Monkeys or apes can be divided into two types: those that have a ruminantlike digestive tract and slowly digest even the most indigestible fibrous foods, much like a cow; and those that have a much speedier and technologically advanced digestive system that produces a whole series of different enzyme secretions. We fit into the second category. The system is more efficient but can handle only foods that are easier to digest—fruit, young leaves, certain vegetables. No stalks for us! Evolutionary theorists believe that this digestive system did two things: firstly, it gave us the motive to improve our mental and sensory
processing so we would know when and where to find the food we needed, and secondly, it gave us the nutrients to develop a more advanced brain and nervous system.

  Did monkeys eat meat and two vegetables?

  I believe the human body has three basic programs for digestion. The first is for digesting concentrated protein, which means meat, fish, and eggs. To digest these foods we have to produce vast amounts of stomach acid and protein-digesting enzymes. After all, when our early ancestors had hunted down and killed an animal, do you think they then went off to handpick a few tasty morsels of vegetation to create that “balanced meal”? I doubt it. I imagine they ate their catch, organs and all, as fast as possible before it spoiled and other predators moved in. They might have spent a couple of days living on nothing but concentrated animal protein. Fresh, raw, organic meat is, after all, highly nutritious.

  Fruit—the Lone Ranger

  At certain times of the year, early humans would have had access to certain fruit. No doubt we were not the only fruit-eating creatures. Since fruit is the best fuel for instant energy, requiring very little digestion, our second program produces the enzymes and hormones necessary to process the simple carbohydrates in fruit. Again, my guess is that we mainly ate fruit on its own. After all, once you had chomped three bananas, there would be little reason to go digging up a few roots.

  Many kinds of soft fruit ferment rapidly once ripe. They will do the same if you put them in a warm, acidic environment, which is what the stomach is. That is what happens if you eat a slice of melon followed by a steak. So Dr. Hay’s advice to eat fruit separately makes a lot of sense. Since fruit takes around thirty minutes to pass through the stomach, whereas whole concentrated protein takes two to three hours, the best time to eat fruit is as a snack more than thirty minutes before a meal or not less than two hours after a meal—possibly more if you eat a lot of concentrated protein. The only exception to this advice is combining fruits that do not readily ferment, like bananas, apples, or coconut, with complex carbohydrate-rich foods such as oats or millet. So a chopped apple on your porridge or a whole-rye banana sandwich would be fine.