Food For Humans - Your Cumming Chiropractor Dr Ekberg

Alright well we've got Dr. Sten Ekberg here he's a neurological based

chiropractor in well now Cumming (GA) right now Alpharetta Cumming (GA) yeah yes um and

just I didn't introduce this last time he was here for the stress lunch and

learn i see a few familiar faces from that but his ???? former Olympian he

was a former Olympian in the decathlon and it was this barcelona olympics

correct twice nine place nice place in the Barcelona Olympics so on that's why

I keep kind of throwing that out there as a teaser so so he's been here you see

you're talking about few for humans how to fuel your body properly let's just

give a big leaseplan welcome thank you very much so how many people were here

last time one person all right on their faces so last time we just talked a

little bit about how the body works that the brain and nervous system is what

regulates the body that it's not about the mechanics of the body because the

the body parts and the functions their secondary to how well the brain is

working and we said that in order for that to happen we have to realize the

the human is is a chemical and structural and an emotional being and if

we want to have optimal health we have to address all three of those areas we

cannot just look at one thing and pay really close attention to that and

ignore the others and think that everything is

work we have to look at the whole that's what holism means so today we were

talking about the nutrition aspect the food aspect of health and as always we

will go into very little detail as far as telling you to eat this and this and

this and this because you've already heard that all your life how many people

know they're supposed to eat more vegetables right that that's not that's

not so difficult to know but what we will talk about is principles of why is

it that way what how does the body work what what are the factors that

determines how it works so first of all when it comes to food it provides us two

things it provides fuel and building blocks and food is that thing which is

supposed to provide nutrition and sustenance and all the things that the

body needs so if you eat for that reason then you're eating food if you're eating

to change how you feel you're eating drugs okay so most of the time in this

country we're eating much more drugs than we're eating food so we'll talk

about how we can find a good balance there and what how it actually works so

just because well we'll get into some detail here but not too much this is

just to show you that food isn't just in your body after you put it in your mouth

because food doesn't do any good until it's in your cells everything before the

cell is just a transportation system first it's in your mouth then it's in

your gut then it's in your digestive system then it gets into your blood it

serves no purpose at all until it is inside your cells so in order for that

to happen the body has to go through all these different

so first you chew it and then you digest it which is about secretions and

peristalsis then when it's broken into small pieces you absorb it and then you

can use those little pieces to build things up and whatever you don't need

you have to excrete but we also have to understand that this is doesn't happen

by accident it's a very very intricate process it uses as much as the third of

your entire energy expenditure of all of the energy of that your body produces

and it gets out of food a third of it already spent just to get that stuff

done so the digestive tract is basically one hole in in the one end and a hole in

the other and just because like I said you put things in the tube it doesn't

mean it gets into the body and we talked about a little bit last time what

happens with stress how stress is a put your body attention toward toward danger

and defense whenever there's something that your body needs to defend against

your body's resources go to that at the expense of digestion and internal

resources so anytime that you're stressed then this process of extracting

food is basically shut down it's not working nearly as well when we're

stressed because all of the blood and all the resources are going to put out

the fires so in order to really truly digest food it's not just about eating

the right thing it's also about having the whole process to place to take care

of it so we me if we live in a high stress lifestyle

we can actually eat all the right stuff and still be undernourished because your

body doesn't utilize it properly so the four basic food groups everybody knows

those the stuff that make me fat stuff that makes me sick stuff that will kill

me and stuff i'll eat anyway you got to know those e so we'll talk just a little

bit about the food pyramid and what's wrong with it there's so much emphasis

on the components of the food that the grams of fat and protein and

carbohydrate and those are mostly nonsensical it doesn't tell you anything

about the quality of the food and what this food is going to do for you so fat

protein and carbohydrate what do they do in the body well fat serves as fuel it

serves as the serves energy reserves it's a precursor for four months most of

our hormones are built either from fat or protein they are structural and they

serve as insulation high quality fats are some of the most important things

that we can eat there's a lot of talk about official now it contains two

things which is EPA which is anti-inflammatory and helps with

cardiovascular disease and things like that and the other portion is DHA which

is the number one structural component of your nervous system and of every cell

membrane in your body so if you're not eating fish oil you should start and get

a good good quality one protein acts the same same exact

functions fueled reserves hormones structural but it's also the only tissue

that can perform contractions so muscles are protein and then we get to

carbohydrate and carbohydrate is fuel that's basically it that it doesn't

really do much so in terms of quality of food what we need to focus on is the

quality of the fact that we're getting the quality of the protein that we're

getting and carbohydrates they are good especially when we get them through

vegetables but the problem is we're getting most of them through starches

and then they do more damage than good but as you can see the important ones

are

I'll be right if you can write them down and save them

till afterwards we'll have a time for that and so fat and protein and equality

that's the important stuff and carbohydrates is it's not a big deal but

when we look at the food pyramid we see that six to 11 servings they recommend

should come from bread cereal rice and pasta these are all starches and that's

not really where you want to get your food at all in terms of nutrition this

part provides you fuel if you're if you're running a marathon or you're on

the road biking all the time then this is good fuel but other than that it

doesn't do much for you so what is good food and one we talked about the quality

of food we need to realize the stuff that is good food is this stuff that

satisfied the criteria that we talked about it needs to provide sustenance it

needs to provide fuel it needs to provide building blocks but it also

needs to interact favorably with that whole process of taking the food in your

the body has to know what to do with it so you have a whole system of enzymes

and receptors that have developed over millions of years that interact and they

have a molecular fit with the food that you eat so the food that's the good for

you food that's really beneficial is the food that your DNA recognizes because

your DNA is the is the blueprint that makes the proteins and the hormones and

the enzymes that are supposed to take care of this stuff and if you put things

into your body that you don't have the enzymes and

and digestive stuff to take care of then that stuff is a burden on your body so

let's look at this our DNA has developed over millions of years but this is one

thing that all physiologists agree on it has not changed significantly in the

last forty thousand years so the significance of that is anything that's

been introduced in human diets in the last forty thousand years is an

experiment it's really really new it's so new that your body doesn't really

know what to do with it and so for all of this time this is forty thousand

years that's how long your DNA has been unchanged and for it for that period

time we have been mostly hunter-gatherers we have been walking

around and eating whatever we can can catch and grow it then around 4,000

years ago we developed agriculture and agriculture changed a lot of things that

allowed for civilization to develop because we could keep people in one

place and some people could do agriculture and other people could do on

their services so society became more advanced and it was a very efficient

food source but even though it's been around for 4,000 years the stuff coming

from agriculture grains is still news it's still relatively new to the body

and in the last hundred and fifty years that meant a line over there that's how

long we've had a modest amount of sugar and processed grains meaning baked

products made from wheat and oats and things like that and then in the last

fifty years we've had an abundant amount of sugar and processed grains and not

only that but those grains have been changed around so that four thousand

years ago we had three kinds of wheat and today we have 25,000 and most of

those have developed in the last 20 30 years so the grains were eating are not

the same grains that these guys ate but on top of that everything is processed

and there's an abundance of sugar and grain the average sugar consumption in

this country is half a pound per person per day that's from the ketchup and the

sodas and the pastries and the snacks on the chocolate bars and all that half a

pound a day so what this means is your body your DNA has had no time whatsoever

to adapt and respond and change because it doesn't happen in hundreds of years

or thousands of years it happens in tens of thousands of years so in order to

provide more of what your body really wants you have to look at well what did

the earth look like what were the things available back then and it doesn't mean

you have to become unter gather but we have to shift our food choices a little

bit in that direction

and if you think about it humans are the only animals on the planet that don't

eat everything straight from the planet that that eat anything that comes out of

package or is cooked or processed or changed in any way every other animal

eats things that can catch pick for gather anything that runs swims moods

rose and anything that was part of a living breathing biology and ecosystem

up until the time that it was caught or picked and eaten so everything else on

the planet eats really really fresh stuff and we eat stuff that's been

sitting on the shelf for a couple of years and the only way that they can

keep it on the on the shelf for a couple of years without growing stuff is to

kill off everything of nutrition in that product so it will keep for that long so

nothing else wants to eat that all right

so what do we want to feed Homo sapiens and that's us by the way meat fish fowl

but we don't want to get it from a mass factory farm we want to get it going to

get the animals that have been having a normal life because that's a completely

different nutrition nuts fruits and various vegetables fruits and grains are

fine in moderation but they should be as whole as possible and there should be a

minimum of modern processed meats much better off eating rice and oats and

millet and an occasional rye or wheat bread sandwich or something like that

what about weight gain so this is the secret about weight gain it's when food

is absorbed faster than it's used then the excess must be stored and what are

the things that get absorbed the fastest from the time that you eat them until

they're in the bloodstream it's sugars and starches so that's why we gain

weight from from eating those and what do we feel like eating when we're

stressed okay because when you're stressed that's an emergency situation

your body is preparing to defend against something it wants to raise the blood

sugar what's the fastest way it's to eat sugar and starch so anytime that we are

stressed then we're going to eat the the worst stuff as well

so the primary fat storage hormone fat cannot be created or stored without the

presence of insulin insulin takes sugar from the blood stream and it takes it

into the cell whatever the cell can use it burns up the excess turns into fat

and insulin is the hormone that does that so weight gain is not really caused

my calories and it's not caused by eating fat it is caused by eating foods

that trigger insulin and that's the sugars and the starches and if you

notice when you eat sugar and starch you're never really satisfied as soon as

an hour or two after you've eaten you can always eat something else whereas if

you eat something with a lot of fiber a lot of vegetables a lot of protein and

some fat then you're satisfied and you're you're satisfied for a much

longer time

and fat and protein do not trigger insulin so you can eat those things but

they're absorbed so slowly that there is no insulin effect and because of that it

is I'm not going to say you can to gain weight from doing that because I'm sure

somebody could prove me wrong but it is much more difficult to gain weight from

that so then people say well I can't eat the good stuff because it's so expensive

so I brought this up to help people understand how cheap food really is in

1930 we spent almost a quarter of our total income on food and it's dropped

throughout the years until today it's less than ten percent of our income that

we spend on food and

this is this decline in prices partially because we're better at producing food

our general level of income is going up but it also comes at a price because the

quality of food has gone down so what we want to do is spend maybe a little bit

more and go look for that whole food and go look for that organic produce and get

the little bit get the grass-fed beef and get the free-range chicken and don't

always look for the for the cheapest cheapest because there is a quality

difference so what do we want to prioritize because food there there's so

much complexity you do more magazines on food you read the more confused you get

so I said we'd talk about principles and here are some of them learn how to

balance bunch of eat things that are lower in sugar starch and alcohol these

things are not poisonous but they become a burden on the body in excess we have

enzymes to deal with them we have alcohol dehydrogenase it is they part

the food but in excess it becomes a burden because it starts pushing and

shifting things around eat more whole line and raw food

whatever the earth produced for us is what the body is designed the DNA you

have the receptors and the enzymes there's a match there you have no match

for artificial sweeteners and artificial colors and artificial flavors and all

that stuff and balanced pH that means a more alkaline food so basically it's not

just a pH of whatever food that that you test outside the body but it's the end

result by the time your body has processed it and it turns out modern

humans are very very acidic and everything that we eat except fruits and

vegetables is acidic so breads and meats and grains and beans and all of those

things are acidic but we balance it out by eating fruits and vegetables so as

long as we have a balance we're okay but if we only eat the acidic stuff then

we're going to build up more and more and more acid and what is the one thing

the number one way for the body to counteract that acidity is called

calcium carbonate and where does that come from

your bones exactly so if you have acid in your body that gets in the blood and

the only way for your body to balance that acid is to pull calcium the primary

ways to pull calcium from the bone so osteoporosis is not so much about eating

calcium as it is getting a pH balance in your body so more more vegetables and

fruits and then you want to start reducing the poisons and increasing

nutrient concentration that means organic free-range local sustainable

farming there's a reason it's not just the the pesticides that they spray on

there even though that's bad enough and there's 85,000 chemicals introduced into

our environment in the last hundred years but it's also about the nutrient

concentration that when you grow something in the soil it pulls about 50

to 55 minerals out of that soil that becomes part of the plant that becomes

part of you then once you've grown the same thing for a long time the soil

becomes depleted and then you have to add back nutrients and minerals into the

soil to grow something will guess what you only have to add back three

nutrients to make it look like a tomato again

so the organic is part about the fact that they have to add back all of those

50 minerals and nutrients because it's more of a sustainable it's it's the

whole what am I looking for the the way nature intended it we're bringing things

back to balance we're not just robbing the soil and putting back a little bit

we're working with nature

so we talked about this last time but we'll

do it a little bit again since there's only one person who is a repeat that if

something is required to maintain health that means you have to meet all those

requirements so if you've tried to raise a plant and you see it wilting a little

bit what's the first thing you're going to give it water and then you feed it

some water and still wilting and what do you try now give it some sunshine take

it out of the closet give it some sunlight and it's still wilting so now

you look for the soil maybe there's toxins and the soil maybe there's

nutrients missing but it's really really simple we understand that a plant needs

water sunshine and good soil and if it doesn't get that you can never raise a

healthy plant if you try a thousand plants for a year you're not going to

have any left if you don't give them these things well the same thing holds

true with you must that we require nutrition we require movements and we

require well-being we need to well feel good and move privately so

what that means is if it's required you can get by for a while but you can never

thrive in the long run you can never thrive for as long as you're supposed to

and how long are we supposed to live probably past hundred probably enjoying

that in good life without any degenerative diseases whatsoever and you

can violate these laws for for a long time 10 20 30 40 years probably but you

can never work as well as you're supposed to if you don't so

think that is all I don't know if we're coming back here but if we do please

feel free to invite some people who need to learn more about how to stay well and

do we have any questions