Grievance #5: Nutrition, NOW! (or: Humans Aren't Pink Sunglasses-Wearing Drummer Rabbits, Pt. 3)
(Once again, these are not ranked: The numbers are present in order to help me keep track while editing the content, and to keep things straight during and after posting. There'd be some pretty absurd ties and/or upsets if I actually ranked even what I had so far, ¡let alone what's to come!)
So, there's a clear absence that's been screaming out this whole time, and that tends to take a form resembling the snark-filled question of "Right, right, this is all nice, but don't I have to eat healthy shit too, and not eat fatty foods? I don't think that I can do that shit, man!"
Fair, though, fair.
By the way, as we're getting into this, I ended up making the title a reference to Frank Costanza, the Seinfeld character that allowed a perfect gateway for the television version of Festivus to get so readily circulated in the first place.
That said, along with the inferred mockery of my own empathy-driven rage, let's continue back on the topic that I actually just set up earlier...
Nutrition is considered important not only for having vitality and that vibrant energy that I hawk like I'm a snake-oil salesman (link provided for the young and old who might not be familiar with the badass reference), but basic day-to-day functioning and having any shot at living into those predicted lifespans without being a total hopeless wreck, by then. The food pyramid is an excellent start for novices that is frequently struck down as being impractical for daily living, but it helps take care of quite a few needs while eliminating a lot of the thinking that neurotic psychopaths like myself do through much of the day. As it is, with few exceptions on an average basis (presumption being that most organs are functioning adequately, most nutrients tend to be absorbed most readily by ingesting them in food sources. In any case, most pill supplements want you to be eating or have just eaten for maximum efficient absorption anyway, as an acknowledgment to this fact.
So, let's presume that you have the use of The Internet in order to look up, on average, the toxicity levels of individual nutrients, along with whether something is water-soluble (i.e. excess will be excreted in urine when the kidneys are in good shape) or fat-soluble (gets stored in the fat if in excess, so that toxic levels are usually a potentially legitimate concern if you keep overdoing it too radically), so that I don't do a run-down of every single nutrient.
Let me concentrate instead on one, because it builds on other entries of mine:
You are not getting enough Vitamin D. I don't want to hear how there's vitamin D in your milk, your orange juice, and your multivitamin that you take to keep things simple (which is fine for early-level health fiends, but I believe in a certain proactive character that lies within people going so far as to read this!): You could probably get more vitamin D. On a side-tangent, I fly into a fucking rage when someone talks about how they simply need to go get a few minutes of sun each day to be okay.
- A lot more ultraviolet light is getting through, and even if you don't believe in global warming specifically, the holes in the fucking ozone layer are pretty blatant, and are letting a lot more UV radiation through, damaging your fucking DNA a bit more readily than that bit of a vitamin D increase, damnit.
- Unless you're working outside all of the time, I bet that doesn't compensate for how much time you're spending studying/working indoors, most certainly.
So, that taken care of as an excuse, let's consider how much is in a multi-vitamin (I'm going to use Centrum as my example, as it's very readily available nationwide in the U.S.):
400 I.U.
I.U. stands for International Units, a standard that's a bit more precise and universal a measurement than all of this milligrams (mg) or other weight-units rubbish, and it's based on the biological activity of the item being measured, so it has a very practical application when applied to a nutrient that has biological relevance.
That said, you need vitamin D at more than one time in the day, as your body clearly is doing shit beyond the one hour in which you're having that Pop-Tart breakfast (or whatever failure to eat right that I might share with you on more than a few days). The amount present in a supplement, that fortifies milk or orange juice... that takes care of nationwide worries of an outright deficiency in many people, and that's all that the government would ever concern itself with. Depending on how much you do, you might actually need more vitamin D, and if you're trying to safeguard your bones against future worries of osteoporosis, it might be a good idea to step it up, a bit. On top of it, the nutrient also has roles to play in neuromuscular activity and immune function (that's right, kids, it's not all about vitamin C and zinc, ¡because the body needs more than a couple of things when an invader is knocking over all the shelves in the shop!), so ot say that this isn't getting a lot of action would be quite the grand mistake.
I do admit that it's a good thing that vitamin D is fortifying foods that also contain calcium, since all of that calcium (that you're clearly getting because you know you need more bone mass to keep up with my other suggestions) is kind of worthless and not utilized without vitamin D, but individuals might want to consider resorting to a higher intake. On top of it, many of these supplements are not necessarily being 100% absorbed, as they tend to be vitamin D2 (QUACK QUACK... QUACK... quack... I like the reference), rather than the much-more readily absorbed vitamin D3, which is mostly only available in deliberate pill-form supplements, at present. The best thing about vitamin D? It has your back: If there's an excess, it doesn't immediately start becoming toxic, and you can super-duper overload before it becomes a problem. The excess gets used when there's not enough being taken in, which is a relief for me when I know that I'm not always 100% the best with my nutrition for a trillion days in a row. Just consider all of the implications for you if you're not getting enough (oh, and let's also consider that women, who have more concerns about retaining bone mass in the midst of various hormonal shifts and losing blood for a few days each month, which includes calcium and vitamin D, among other things, should probably get more in order to build even healthier bones in advance), on all of those levels, and it's kind of a given that you should get more vitamin D.
The sad fact is that, myself included sometimes (though I've gotten much better), you're also probably not eating at a reasonable pace or quantity. Consider the starvation-defense mechanisms that are in place to have allowed the ancestors (who, as we so far can believe, did not have refrigerators with Häagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry's ice cream inside) to survive in between all-too-infrequent meals, but didn't go away when said refrigerators came about. A trait that was frequently rewarded is now our enemy, because it's easy to be fat. Now now, you must... chill! I will say this again later, but I'm not a fan of emaciated skeleton humans... it's not attractive. Anyway, now that I have you panicking at least a little less for a while, back to what I'm talking about... the three square meals a day fits a schedule that doesn't even match to what we're doing now, let alone back then. ¿Do you really think that you're using all of the calorie energy that you're getting from that Xmas dinner? With maybe a few exceptions, I imagine that the answer is usually that you are not. Let's also not forget that you're probably stressed from your Modern Age lifestyle in some way, so that you're also in Fight/Flight Mode, and are probably trying to store calories as readily as possible, while also putting them in the highest-energy form possible so that you can make it out of there now, and prepare for if the scuffle you're supposedly going to get into leaves you injured for a long while (and theoretically unable to get food in an Early Historic Period). Your metabolism is likely to go into a certain level of shutdown, as far as burning the calories immediately: ¡You might need them later!
Dude, body... we're going to eat again at dinner.
No, we haven't eaten again, and we just got a lot of calories... WE MUST STORE THEM!
Fuck, ¿why do we even talk anymore?
Distress! Anger! We are in danger!
¡Shut up!
...
...so there's that. Then, on top of it, you have to basically imagine your mitochondion as power plants. Actually, hang on... Mitochondria (as the plural actually is) are an organelle that exist in nearly every living cell of yours (as in, you shouldn't really count those amongst most of the visible cell layers that you present to the world, because those are old and dead layers, let alone other dead tissues that form support systems internally). In fact, I will somewhat simplify things by suggesting more basically that they are the bacteria which we have the friendliest relationship with (although they are certainly not the only ones, they are the main ones that we have internal to the cell). You might find this bizarre, of course, for me to say that, especially since we are taught that they are an organelle, like I was just saying. However, they do have their own DNA, and they are not constructed from the DNA code in the nucleus of a cell, like basically every other part of the cell worth mentioning in a technically short entry. There is a setup coming, but I think you can spot that a mile away by this point in my "Grievances" series...
Like any classic power plant (I am not referring necessarily to solar plants or wind farms, so fucking work with me, here), there is a by-product of that metabolic activity that these mitochondria undergo in order to make aerobic respiration work and give all of the wonderful energy that you're probably taking for granted when you're fist-pumping to the new Super Mario Bros. game for the Wii (which I wish I owned, let alone the fact that I'm separated from my Wii, now that I finally fucking have time to play it). Those mitochondria are the reason that aerobic respiration happens in complex eukaryotic cell-laden creatures like us, rather than the extremely lower-energy fermentation processes that we tend to resort to when we just can't keep up with the demands of our muscle activity, or simply want some other organism to do our bidding for making yogurt, beer, or harder liquors. So you can clearly see that these are the little guys/gals that we want to be working well at any given time. However, when they're being given a shit load more caloric energy to process, that 'pollution' (in the form of free radicals) builds up faster than what is considered "usual" and can damage the DNA of these mitochondrion every bit as much as UV radiation can cause free radicals to form and damage the DNA of our dermal layers. To make matters worse, these mitochrondria have a whole lot less DNA in the first place, so that the same amount of mutation has a much bigger potential impact. Sure, they have the same mechanisms as the contents of the nucleus for repairing and correcting damage, but let's imagine a shitload of binge eating or binge drinking on a regular basis, and how quickly the probabilities could add up, for that. ¡It's a wonder any of us manage to survive the modern diet, at this point!
It doesn't take that much, thusly, for a mitochondrion individual to become either completely dead or reproducing incorrect descendants, etc.. If you get this happening regularly and rapidly enough, you have a widespread inability to process sugars of simple and complex sorts that takes places in the cell, or perhaps tissue, or organ, depending on how widespread the problem is. Keep in mind again that this isn't a code that's being given in the overall DNA code of the main cells. In fact, these mitochondria were given to you via their ancestors through your mother, because the egg gamete of the pair is a larger than full-sized cell that contains all of your embryo's original organelles. The implications to set up future metabolic problems in offspring become alarmingly noticeable when the situation is viewed in this light.
But, of course, we have no problem with over-feeding ourselves at every single meal. Most of you aren't laborers per se (and frankly, neither am I), so you're not really readily burning these calories off. The overall net result works out, but we never really find it too worrisome that this happens in spite of the same starvation mechanisms that I was mentioning before, and how quickly they take hold. Now let's fastforward, for most of you: You see these energy crashes, the situations where people "hit the wall" at 24 or 30 or 40, etc., when that charmingly slim figure just can't take all of the abuse anymore. ¿Does it ever occur that the excesses of the past can set up the failures of the future, considering everything I noted, and the multiple individual papers that are leaning behind many of the statements that I am rambling about, let alone how it doesn't strike me as a surprise that your metabolism might closely resemble that of your mother's when she gave birth to you (I'd like to take a brief moment to say that I love my Mum)? Go on, eat your shitty fast food all the time, because your generation happens to be working out alright, ignore those amongst us who come from families that consumed a lot of fast food already, and scratch your heads when the kids aren't alright.
Or eat in moderation. I don't want you to starve, I really don't: A lot of shit shuts down, from brains to sexual capabilities to just about every organ imaginable at thresholds much higher than what you're guessing, most likely.
This is, by the way, where those vegetables (and plenty of fruits, truthfully) come back into play as being important: Their antioxidants are more readily absorbed than in supplements, and antioxidants are exactly what counter the possibilities of free radicals oxidizing parts of the mitochondria and the DNA to wreak their havoc in the first place, much like in the instances regarding that damage from the smoke and charred food in Grievance #2.
I'm suggesting that, unless you have some critical beliefs against eating more than three times in a day, that you become a snacker, a "grazer" as I think they call it. Break the day up into smaller meal chunks, and you might also find that getting in the nutrients that I was mentioning above might become a bit easier when you're dividing by a higher number than three. As it is, your metabolism will also run higher in genral, even before we factor in exercise (which you're clearly doing, ¿RIGHT?), because it isn't so readily going into that starvation mode that it has to get kicked back out of in the midst of a new meal being provided. Your liver won't get destroyed so quickly by an excess of fat inside that isn't being worked on actively by the liver, and I think I've noted that to be a pretty nice thing in general. You'll notice that I didn't even necessarily say that you couldn't have the occasional high-calorie food, but I've also noted that you have to burn that off at some point too, so I think that you can put all of that together to be responsible.
Make the changes now, so that later can be a bit nicer, for you.
You're irritating enough right now when you're bitching idly about being tired, so I hardly think you're going to find me up for being around that often when you're complaining about it all the time, because you never stop being tired (and labored).