Ancestral Health for the Modern World
It’s Not Just My Health: Finding Ancestral Context Ep.52
Episode 52 of the Ancestral Elements Podcast turns one! This week we will look back at the fundamental elements of nature that give not only us nutrition, but our food nutrition.
Going through a nutrition program I continually had the feeling that the information I was receiving somehow didn’t add up. Like I had been thrown into the middle of a movie where there was no context. What I was learning didn’t have the impact that it should because what was being taught had no context or structure to it. This is exactly why the rest of the population doesn’t value nutrition or food and why it’s all such a mystery.
It’s very easy to reduce our idea of nutrition down to individual food items. Often calories take the main conceptual identity following vitamins and minerals. It’s the raw elements in nature that provide the nourishment to the species of food we consume. Without nutrient rich soils, proper sun or water, the plants we eat would not be nutrient dense. The animals we eat would not have a nutrient rich diet as herbivores, and further decline other of species would ensue.
It’s this delicate and precise interconnected ecology that dictates our nutritional status. It has nothing to do with the individual species of vegetable that ends up on our table and everything to do with the natural elements that shape our environment and food.
Don’t be fooled into thinking a serving of carrot has:
25 calories 6g carbohydrates 2g fiber 3g sugar 0.5g protein Vitamin A Vitamin C Vitamin K Calcium Potassium Iron
A carrot is merely a reflection of its genetic expression and environment. While it is true that a carrot can contain those nutrients, it only contains those individual nutrients if it is enabled through the environment and elements to reach its full genetic potential.
We tend to think of food as the sole way in which we gain nutrition, but food is the end expression of nutrition. Nutrition is complex ecology coming together as a manifestation of objects we can integrate into our biology. The 5 basic elements, give rise to the 5 kingdoms of life, those kingdoms create genetically distinct species (diversity) in which we eat parts of those species (genetics). This is where our microbiota meets our genetics. Without a healthy gut and digestive system nutrients cannot be utilized and integrated into our bodies this negatively impacts your genes. Or to put it another way, in order to really honor the species you are eating make sure your body is actually using it. If you are not metabolically healthy then you must do whatever is needed to get metabolically healthy.
We also absorb nutrition, in the form of sun, water, metals, and earth. Fire from the sun or by captured sunlight given up by wood is absorbed into our biology in way of inferred light, then dependent on the type of light being absorbed triggers hormonal changes to our biology effecting our mitochondria, microbiota, and genetics.
We need to let go of the notion that our health or lack thereof only affects us. Just like a carrot trying to meet its full genetic potential you have a long genetic history from your ancestral past that is with you at this very moment. If you want health moving forward you must recognize your past, work within its proper parameters to devise a health strategy you can pass down the line.
Scientific Papers:
https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/food-additive-emulsifier-cmc-gut-bacteria-inflammation/