If you try to emulate me on your diet and you think you will be benefited even if you occasionally indulge in “good, delicious food”, you must read what I read after I have posted “My Diet”. You will be delighted and benefited from reading it.
‘Just one high-fat, high-sugar meal can trigger a biochemical cascade, causing inflammation of blood vessels and immediate, detrimental changes to the nervous system, according to the paper, published in the 7th week of 2008 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. And just one healthy meal helps return your body to its optimal state. "Your health and vigor, at a very basic level, are as good as your last meal," says lead author James O'Keefe, head of preventive cardiology at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo.
Here's how it works. When you eat, your body breaks down the food into a stream of nutrients, including glucose (sugar), lipids (fats), and amino acids (the building blocks of protein). If your meal happens to be junk food the rush of sugar causes something called "post-prandial hyperglycemia": a big spike in blood-sugar levels. Poor diet in the long-term leads to hypertension and build-up of gunk in blood vessels that increases heart-attack risk. But there are short-term effects too. Tissue becomes inflamed, just as it does when infected. Blood vessels constrict. Free radicals, unstable molecules that cause cell damage and are thought to contribute to chronic disease and aging, are generated. The body's stress response has a bigger effect on blood pressure, raising it higher than normal. People may notice they feel crummy a few hours after eating junk food. And the sudden surge and drop in insulin — the hormone that spurs your body to store energy — also leaves them feeling hungry again soon after eating, despite having had plenty of calories.
The good news is that these blood-sugar spikes and crashes are easy to regulate. Blood sugar will rise and fall quickly if, for example, a person eats an easily digested meal of only white bread. The common denominator of all these slow-release foods, says O'Keefe, is a generally high nutritive value with low calories. The healthy foods are exactly the ones you would expect, all that stuff your mom (and your doctor) told you to eat: lots of fresh vegetables and fruits, lean proteins like fish and legumes, and high-fiber whole grains. All of them blunt the post-prandial spike..
"You can improve your health, basically, from hour to hour," he says.’
I keep on saying that we are limited by our personal knowledge and our personally knowledge is in turn limited by human knowledge of our time. The above piece of human knowledge is new and is not yet widely possessed and its validity is not widely tested. I quote it in my blog as an attempt to propagate it so that, in time, it will be more widely known and tested.
If this research result is not falsified in time, then, what we eat does more than just directly affecting our physical conditions by being part of our physical constituent; it affects us also by stimulating our nervous response to generate biochemicals from our body which affect our physical conditions. What we eat that is not excreted is absorbed and/or stored; what is absorbed will be part of us physically. Now this research is telling us in addition, what we eat stimulate us to generate biochemicals from our body that will have tremendous effect on our body, at least in the short term.
I can’t help asking the next question: how does our volition come into play in such a case since our volition may override our response to physical stimulation in some cases? If our volition does play a role here, then, for the some person when he takes the same food at different times in a different state of mind, or with different attitude towards the food he eats, the effect of the food on his body will be different since different nervous responses will be effected to generate different biochemicals. I tend to believe in this speculation and do advise that you have good mental attitudes towards your food every time you eat. Be grateful to the providers and enjoy your food, and get more benefits out of it, why not?
Further more, even if when we are not eating, that is to say, when there is no physical stimulation, can our volition trigger nervous responses that generate biochemicals in our body? Again, I tend to think it can. One way to do this is by visualization. Do you want to try it? If so, do be “positive”! "Negative" thoughts may be harmful.
By Hiew Jan 2008
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