Chapter 1
Getting Clinical about Nutrition
In This Chapter
Conceptualizing clinical nutrition
Understanding the fundamentals of clinical nutrition
Becoming aware of the growing international focus on proper nutrition
The fact that you are reading this book means that you are at least partially tuned into the connection between what you eat and how it affects your health. Congratulations! Either through a course you are taking or through your own personal curiosity, you are choosing to get better acquainted with the study of diet and how it influences your overall status of health and wellness.
The relationship between what you eat and how healthy you are can be complex, but it's not impossible to understand. In fact, this text focuses on a few simple guidelines:
- You must eat fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
- You must moderate your fat, salt, and sugar intakes.
- You must exercise.
If you follow all these guidelines, you'll find yourself more healthy than not and will realize the truth behind the adage that you are what you eat.
This chapter takes you on a quick tour of the fundamental principles related to the study of clinical nutrition. Retaining a basic understanding of the concepts I introduce you to here is a great foundation for all the chapters that follow.
Pillars of the Practice: Recognizing theLinks between Nutrition and Health
To state the obvious, food is essential for human survival. Since humans — or some form thereof — first started to walk the earth, the human body has evolved to benefit from the foods available in a given environment.
Generations of trial and error, in which we sampled literally tens of thousands of different species of potential food, enabled us to obtain from nature the nutrients needed for life. Our bodies adapted over thousands of years to both the bounty and the scarcity of what existed in the environment — what we were able to gather, hunt, and farm.
Recently, however, that relationship has been altered, and along with that change is a realization that modern eating habits aren't necessarily better. From that realization have sprung efforts to return to a healthier way of eating.
Revisiting traditional views of food and health
Just up until the middle of the last century, people ate a variety of foods that were in balance with the major food groups. Through the process of evolution, humans naturally gravitated toward a diet that was relatively in tune with what the body needed to survive. The availability of — and our preferences for — food were naturally balanced in a way that provided a healthy diet. Whether the available diet and the human body's needs evolved together is uncertain, but one thing we do know for sure is that, back then, humans didn't overeat as much.
A snapshot of the past
Before industrialization, globalization, and modern farming and transportation techniques, food was scarcer than today. You ate what you needed — not what you wanted — and what was available.
Convenience stores selling all kinds of processed foods didn't dot every city corner. Nor were there gigantic supermarkets holding thousands of items to choose from. If you wanted a grape grown in Chile or an apple grown in New Zealand, you needed to live in (or pretty darn close to) those countries, because systems for transporting fresh food around the globe didn't exist.
Basically, you had yourself to rely on: You had to grow and harvest your own food, and prepare it yourself — all tasks that involve lots of manual labor. Of course, hunger was an issue (as it still is for too many people today), but the overabundance of food that's common today simply did not exist back then.
Fast forward to today
Today, the food landscape is very different. You can walk into a supermarket and buy almost any fresh product from any corner of the world. You can swing by a convenience store for a quick snack and a mega-gulp. You can go to a fast-food restaurant and buy a meal packed full of a day's worth of calories and gobble it down within 15 minutes of walking in the door. You have the world at your culinary disposal.
Ample quantities of food are available, and you don't have to exert much physical labor to procure it. Before, if you wanted a special type of walnut from some distant land, you'd probably have to go there yourself, or order it and wait four months for it to arrive at the dock. You wouldn't be able to find it prepackaged in plastic in aisle 10 of your local megamart.
Never has such a scenario existed in the course of human history. Consider yourself lucky — and then recognize the health trade-off that's occurred due to the abundance of unhealthy, highly processed foods.
Diets that are high in fat, salt, and sugar have become more commonplace. Public health and nutrition researchers theorize that this phenomenon has promoted epidemic levels, perhaps even
pandemic (worldwide) levels, of adverse health effects. Whereas the rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes (and even some type of cancers) occurred at drastically lower levels before the mid-20th century, today those conditions occur at an alarming rate.
With the discovery of the direct relationship between the foods we eat and these (and other) health conditions, people are beginning to return to a more simplistic, healthier, and, dare I say, natural way of eating food. (For details on the relationship between diet, nutrition, and a variety of conditions and diseases, head to Part II.)
Introducing the key tenets of clinical nutrition
Clinical nutrition is the study of the connection between your body's overall state of wellness and the foods you eat each day. What's so interesting about this field is that, if you go beyond the details (how particular nutrients do particular things or what proportion of what kinds of foods produces optimal results, for example), you realize that it really matters: Because of this awareness, clinical nutrition, in a sense, seeks to re-establish the connection people used to have with food, in which their diets provide the nutrients necessary to ensure adequate nourishment and to build and maintain healthy, strong, and resilient bodies.
If you took all the tips and tricks mothers, fathers, grandparents, and others have passed down about what to eat to maintain healthiness or to prevent disease, and distilled those nuggets into a science, you would end with many of the key tenets of clinical nutrition. Here are some things that Grandma may have said and what modern science shows (I delve into these tenets in more detail throughout this book):
- You are what you eat: If you eat too much fat and calories without being active, you'll put on weight. If you eat healthy foods, you'll be healthy. If you eat lots of carrots, you'll be . . . okay, well this one doesn't quite work, but interestingly you can get beta-carotene poisoning, which makes your skin turn orange . . . like a carrot! Silly example aside, the point is still a good one: What you put into your body has a direct affect on your body and your health.
- An apple a day keeps the doctor away: The quality of the food you eat has a direct impact on your health. (I cover the role of diet in a variety of diseases in the chapters in Part II).
Ask yourself this question: Would you put sand into the fuel tank to make the vehicle run? Of course not. Not unless you want to irreparably damage the inner workings of your car. A car needs gasoline, not sand, just as your body needs healthy, whole foods for better health outcomes. Both need the best sources of fuel to optimally perform.
- Don't eat anything you don't recognize as food: Your body evolved to digest food, not food products, to maintain health. You want to eat as many simple, whole foods as possible. Eating oranges is ...
