What Should Humans Eat? Food For Humans - User Manual For Humans S1 E03 - Dr Ekberg

good evening and welcome everybody I am Dr. Sten Ekberg and I'm excited to have

you here we're going to talk about user manuals for humans part 3 and today is

the first and ever possibly be some more talks on food for humans so I call it

food for humans so that it's Ken a little funny but we want to start

thinking about about humans how many people here realize that you are an

animal hands up okay so basically if you're not an animal then you must be

either mineral or plant and we tend to forget that we are humans and that we

aren't animals and that's why I phrase it that way that we're part of nature

we're part of biology and the food that we therefore also has to be fitting for

us so when we talk about food there's two aspects of it and most people focus

only on the physical matter of food they talk about the components and what the

food can do for us in terms of fuel and what the food can do for us in terms of

building blocks and the building blocks of protein and carbohydrates and fat and

then there's some minerals and vitamins as catalysts and it's well enough if we

put it into the body but there's also the other aspect of food is the act of

incorporation we have to bring it into the body somehow and there are several

steps involved there and the first is mastication that's chewing we have to

start preparing we have to make smaller pieces of the foods our bodies can start

using it the second part is digestion where we continue to break the food

apart and then we start attacking it and making it smaller smaller pieces with

secretions of digestive enzymes and then we move it around with peristalsis

that's the movement of Testaments that move the food forward

and they kind of churn it around and once all that is done we have to

absorb the food and after that we have chemical processes of building things up

called anabolism and that's simply another word for building up and then

whatever part of the food that we can't use we have to get rid of and excrete

and if we don't excrete it properly then we get toxic so excretion is also a

the first form of detoxification so we want to talk about everybody here knows

then you're supposed to eat more vegetables and you're supposed to eat

less sugar and don't drink too many beers everybody knows that but we want

to focus on are the whys we want to ask the question why don't would want to do

that or do we want to do that what is the process in the body what happens

when we eat certain foods so next we put food in to our mouths and then it enters

the digestive tract so what is the digestive tract and the simplest way of

looking at it is that it's a long tube it has a hole in one end and it has a

hole in the other man that's what the digestive system is and it's important

to understand that because just because you've put something in your mouth does

not strictly mean that it is inside your body and when I say that I mean that the

functional tissue of your body is inside the cell the machinery and the decisions

and all of the regeneration and the DNA everything that that it has is part of

that complex machinery is inside the cells and unless we can get the

foodstuffs inside the cell it's not really gonna

do anything so we put the food in one end of the tube and it comes out the

other end of the tube and whatever we extract of the food to make use of is an

active process and that's very important to understand because if we don't have

that active process if that active process isn't working properly then

we're not going to absorb a whole lot of nutrients theoretically it's possible to

put things in one hand and have every piece of useful thing come out the other

end and eating was basically useless what we also need to understand is we

talked a lot about sympathetic and parasympathetic where the stress fires

off the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system handles

the processes of digestion so what this means is when we are in a state of

stress we are sacrificing our parasympathetic nervous system and we

are not able to absorb very much nutrients from the food so you can be

stressed and eat the perfect diet and not absorb very much useful nutrients so

that's crucial to understand because everybody talks about Oh eat this eat

this eat this nobody talks about take a five-minute siesta take a five-minute

breathing session relax before during and after your meal so you can actually

use the food weight gain there is we're going to touch very quickly on a few

misconceptions and we're open to questions and then we're going to expand

on them in future sessions but weight gain is when your food is absorbed

faster than it's used so it's not so much how much the quantity of food or

calorie that you eat that will make you gain

weight but there needs to be a balance between how quickly the food enters your

bloodstream relative to how quickly your body will use it so any excess portion

anything that you absorb faster than you burn the excess has to be stored and the

human body is very limited in storing energy it can basically do it in two

forms and one is as glycogen that's a carbohydrate storage and the

muscles and the liver but you can only store maybe a hundred to 200 grams

that's about four five six seven hundred calories worth anything more than that

you have to store as fat your body has no other way of doing it so the excess

typically gets converted to fat and you have an unlimited ability to store fat

you can store a couple of million calories of fats very very easily but

only a few hundred calories of carbohydrates and that's why the excess

so quickly gets turned into fat also we know us we must understand that the only

thing that can store fat on your body the only thing that can store it energy

is called insulin insulin is a hormone that takes sugar from the blood and

takes it out of the blood and into the cells so without insulin you cannot

store anything and that means unless you trigger an

insulin response you cannot have a fat gain so weight gain is caused by foods

that trigger insulin and which once of those there anything that raises blood

sugar anything that gets absorbed into the bloodstream quickly and this is

primarily sugar starch and outlaw so anytime that we eat those three we jack

up our blood sugar very quickly anytime we stay away from those three

we're gonna have a much more level blood sugar so weight gain is not caused by

the number of calories it's caused by how quickly those calories are absorbed

and therefore weight gain is not caused by eating fat because fat and protein do

not trigger an insulin response they're absorbed so slowly into the body that do

not evoke an insulin response and therefore those two foodstuffs fat and

protein are not very much responsible for weight gain I have to read when I

looked for a food pyramid and I found this article on the champion of

champions breakfast and breakfast number one skim milk

half a banana one serving of oatmeal with no calorie butter spray Splenda and

a dash of cinnamon so right away we have skim milk we've taken away the fat that

gives us a sense of satiety we're talking about pasteurized milk probably

which is very very unsuitable for human consumption half a banana is a sugary

fruit that will raise your blood sugar one serving of oatmeal will raise your

blood sugar Splenda is a pesticide so you're eating all this processed

altered food that is no good for humans that jack up the blood sugar and then

you - some pesticides on it and this is in most people's eyes a very suitable

and and healthy good diet breakfast breakfast number two - egg whites plus

one egg yolk and egg yolk and a dash of skim milk scramble no calorie cooking

spray add a half a cup of skim milk and a slice of whole grain bread with no

calorie butter so all the way through they're talking about take away

everything that gives your satiety take away all the fat that makes you feel

full and instead everything that they suggest is low fat altered milk and

grains all of which will raise your blood sugar

and get converted into fat so it doesn't matter how much or little fat you eat

your body is gonna make what it needs and the more carbs that you eat the more

fat you animate the food pyramid and the classic view is at the bottom is the

foundation we have bread we have pasta we have grains cereals and so forth and

they're telling us to eat six to 11 servings per day of this stuff and the

more that you study this stuff and the more you talk to people who really know

they're going to tell you this stuff if you eat that way it will give you

diabetes and it will give you heart disease so not only is it not good for

you it will actually create diseases eating that way it says - for fruit

servings of fruits three to five servings of vegetables and then you get

meat poultry fish dry beans - three servings milk yogurt and cheese two to

three servings and then at the top fats oils and sweet

enjoy sparingly so let's take let's take a look at that on the next slide and

let's see what those food nutrients what are they good for what do they do for us

so fat is one of the most important fuels that we have because it's a high

quality fuel that is absorbed very slowly it sustains blood sugar and it's

a very very healthy way of getting your your fuel fat also acts as energy

reserves that's how the body stores them fat is a major component of your hormone

system so cholesterol and quality essential fatty acids are very very

important for your hormone for your endocrine system fat is also structural

it acts as insulation in both for for a thermal insulation and electrical

insulation for the nerves so fat has a whole lot of different functions and

some of them are are unique to fact we cannot do without it and that's why they

have something called essential fatty acids protein protein also has a bunch

of different functions it can act as fuel it can access reserves half or more

of the hormones in the body are called peptides

that's a subclass of hormones and probe the proteins are also structural because

your muscles and all your contractile tissue is made of protein entirely

so protein and fat both have very important and widespread and unique

functions that you cannot replace with anything else carbohydrate on the other

hand is fuel only that's the only thing that carbohydrate is good for so in

terms of survivability and essential food stuff you can do fine without

carbohydrates you can live a long long healthy life with virtually no

carbohydrates but you cannot survive without fat and protein so in terms of

importance just looking at that fatty protein a very important carbohydrate

not very important and yet in the food pyramid they say fats and oils enjoy

sparingly and for some reason as if there was something bad about them they

put fats and oils and sweet in the same group as if they were related they have

nothing to do with each other and sweets yes those are processed carbohydrates

you need to stay away from them but fats and oils in a natural form the way they

occur in nature is maybe our most important nutrient so food pyramid

forget all about it and next is the cartoon there's this kid zoo giving us

report and he says the four basic food groups are stuff that make me fat stuff

that will make me sick stuff that will kill me and stuff that

I'll eat anyway so that's kind of how people feel about food that there's been

books written about why you can't eat every single kind of

about their so what what do you mean everything is bad right

the they told us for you for decades that meet this bad red meat this bad and

fishes bad is gonna have me mad whole son sugars bad the fat is bad and then

this and that is bad so let's just forget all about that and start talking

about what food really is and what good food really is so good food is food that

contains fuel and nutrients for energy and building blocks that can be

converted to human tissue and think about that because this nail was food a

month ago this piece of skin was carrot or an egg or spinach or something last

month so the whole purpose of food is to provide building blocks and to provide

the stuff that can sustain the body and give it fuel and materials for

regeneration next good food is food that is recognized by your enzymes and

receptors so if you put something in your body that the receptors and the

enzymes doesn't know what to do with it doesn't have a good key or puzzle piece

fit then your body won't know what to do with that so when we take the natural

food that has those proper pieces and we change it then the body doesn't

recognize anymore it's not a proper food a good food is

food that will not wreak havoc with your physiology and hormone balance so

primarily again we're talking about insulin

sugars starches and alcohols will mess severely with your blood sugar balance

and therefore with your insulin which is one of the foundation key key factors in

your in your endocrine system and good food is food that your DNA recognizes so

we're gonna spend a little bit of time talking about this that ultimately

everything that you put into your body has to be broken down into smaller

pieces and those smaller pieces have to be able to cooperate and fit and mingle

with digestive enzymes and with your body tissues so your body has developed

over tens of thousands of years and all the physiological processes and all the

molecules have developed a certain fit over time and it has done that because

Nature has provided a certain kind of food and that's how it is with every

animal in nature they are adapted over eons to their environment so whatever it

occurs in nature are things that fit your body that you're supposed to have

and it can't be any other way because then we wouldn't be here so when we talk

about history when we talk about DNA we need to realize that the DNA of human

Homo sapiens is virtually unchanged for the last

forty thousand years there's been a mass of articles in literature physiology

literature's that state this fact and they all agree for forty thousand years

our DNA has not significant be changed so when we think about that

that means any food that's introduced in the last 40 thousand years is new to the

body it doesn't recognize it and any food that has been changed is not

recognized by the money so we look at this at this diagram here historical

adaptation so if we have a time line 40,000 years that's a long long time

40,000 years this is the period of time that we have lived on earth and for most

events since our DNA changed last and during that time we have mostly eaten

off what the land provides we have been what's called hunters and gatherers and

so those types of foods agree very well your body knows what to do with them and

it can it can function in a stable manner on those foods then we look at

the most not the most recent but the the major significant event in human history

is called agriculture and it occurred about four or five thousand years ago

give or take and when you look at it in perspective to the total range of time

that we're talking about the forty thousand years it is still a blink it is

still a very very short time four thousand years is nothing when it comes

to to evolving DNA so even though the Egyptians started agriculture and that

seems like a really long time ago it's not very long because we have the

same physiology they have now let's look acts

the time period that we have had processed food and grains processed

grains that's about a hundred and fifty years so for the last hundred and fifty

years or so we've had quite a bit of processed foods but it still hasn't been

dominating our food supply and then for the last 50 years and the last even the

last 20 and that's such a short time that if I was to write it

proportionately be so thin that you couldn't even see it and that's when the

dominance the majority of our food supply has been severely processed and

altered and there's an abundance of sugars and starches and not to mention

all the additives in food so frankly our bodies our DNA has absolutely no idea

what to do with that food and it has become most of the food that we eat and

that's why we are in such a bad state as as we alarmed so think about this what

what are the other animals on earth eat the basically they eat anything that

they can catch pick or gather so all of those are foods that are purely produced

by the planet by Mother Earth and they eat anything that is or was recently

part of a living and breathing ecosystem here on the planet so if we look at food

in that perspective we can see the stark contrast between that and anything that

we pick up in in the grocery store so what do we want to feed Homo sapiens

well first off we want to have a good protein source we want to eat meat fish

fowl any sort of animal that runs around but we want to eat the animals that had

a natural life and that have been fed and eating things that are natural for

them so most of the beef or that you buying the store is corn-fed

and corn is not the natural food for a cow account would never select corn to

eat if you give him a choice but in those food raising plants they don't

have a choice so they eat the corn and they get really sick and they need

medication and chemicals to to tolerate it so that makes me a beef of food that

just not very suitable it's not a quality food then we want to eat nuts

and fruits and berries and we're going to eat them in the form that nature

produces them one of my favorite pet peeves is whenever they say made from

because whenever they say made from whatever it is if it's made from apples

well if it's not an apple anymore it's not an apple anymore so when you make

something from something it's totally irrelevant when you mess with it it's

not what it used to be and it can't provide the nutrients and participate in

your ecology the way that it did before and we want to eat vegetables and roots

like carrots and potatoes and different things and we want to eat very limited

whole grains we can eat some we can tolerate a little bit but we're not

really made to eat a lot of grains so let's just give an example of that let's

talk about wheat there's an epidemic of wheat intolerance and celiacs disease

and what could not be where could that be from well let's look historically ten

thousand years ago and the time period we're looking back here our ancestors

probably ate some wheat but they had two kinds of wheat they were called Emmer

and einkorn and they had 40% protein then 9,000 years ago there was a natural

hybrid and we had a third kind of weed called Twitty comes something and that

was all the time three weeks all the way up to modern

times and today and in the last few decades it has exploded into twenty five

thousand types of wheat and they have this happened with hybridization by

mixing species but more disturbingly it's happening with genetic manipulation

so they go in and they through manipulation they insert and extract

genetic traits and genetic code from these foodstuffs and we don't really

know how they're going to interact with a lot a long term because they've never

been part of the food chain it is not a natural food anymore and if you look at

one thing the the traits that they try to develop is not flavor or nutrition it

is resistance to weather and pesticides those are the basic things that they're

interested in developing and in doing this they're changing important

characteristics of the food it's not the same food anymore it doesn't have a

natural genetic makeup and one example we can talk about is the protein it used

to be back here there was 40% protein today normal weeds

the average wheat has 12% protein so it's just not something that comes from

nature anymore and of course the fast food industry the next cartoon here our

challenge is to convince the public that heart attacks are sexy they can just do

that then well they're pretty close they're pretty close so when we talk

about food priorities there's so many different things to keep track of what

do we do where do we start well the first thing that I want to recommend and

these are my opinions I would say balance blood sugar if you're just going

to do one thing with you with your food choices you want to

balance blood sugar that means you lower sugar starch and

alcohol and you get good quality vegetables protein and fat secondly you

want to eat more whole food more live foods and more raw foods that's the way

all other animals eat them that's the way they occur in nature that's the way

they fit the best into your biology that means you eat less package less

processed and definitely less additives and chemicals as well thirdly if you

want to start getting a little more picky then you want to start trying to

balance your pH and that means you want to try to get it in the alkaline

direction because most people today are very very acidic that most of the things

we eat such as grain and protein and processed foods are very acidic the

alkaline foods are going to be fruits and vegetables and anything that is

naturally water rich and then lastly you want to start trying to reduce the

poison and increase the nutrient concentration you want to try to raise

the quality of the food that you eat and that means you want to start looking for

organic food you'll want to start looking free-range and local and

sustainable foods and what this does is the poison obviously doesn't belong in

your body and interferes with your Wow biological processes and also when you

feed a plant or an animal or a vegetable or a very if you feed an artificial

nutrients then it basically gets bloated and big and pretty but it doesn't have

nutrient content in it so when you eat organic and local and sustainable then

you're increasing your nutrient concentration as well as reducing the

poison so let's we'll quick go over and talk

about what's required to maintain health so what would you say if you're trying

to race a plant and the plant isn't doing too well what what's the first

thing that you're gonna give it water okay so now you're you're feeding it

you're watering your plant but it's still not doing very well what's the

next thing that you think of appropriate somewhat sunlight exactly so now you're

giving in water and sunlight and it's still not very happy what what are you

thinking solely exactly because plants need three things you can ask a

five-year-old so I'm not trying to make you look bad here fine girl will know

that you've got to put the plant in the soil and you have to give it water you

have to give it some light so for the life form called plants those elements

are required how many times if you try a million times to raise a plant you give

it two out of three you plant put it in the soil but you're saying no I'm just

gonna give it some like no water how many healthy plants are you gonna

have yeah exactly and and and it doesn't matter which ingredient we remove if

something is required we cannot get a healthy plant long term with

with two out of three and the same thing holds true for humans so what do humans

need humans have nutritional needs we have structural physical movement needs

and we have emotional needs so what this means is we need to eat well we need to

move well we need to think well and eating well we've talked about what that

means you need real food and less poison moving well means just when it sounds

like we need exercise we need to move our physical apparatus is designed for

movement it does not function without movement and if you try to withhold

movement for any length of time the body degenerates the whole system every

aspect muscular neurological everything degenerates and think well that means we

have to feel good we have to have a purpose we have to have most of our

thoughts or at least some of our thoughts need to be positive and hopeful

if we're always feeling bad if we're always depressed and or stressed than

our bodies break down as well so these are requirements of humans eat well move

well think well and of course movement if you have a body if you have a spine

and a body that where the joint range of motion isn't what it should be then

exercise is not going to go all the way exercise will help but it will only be

partially beneficial because if the joints aren't moving that's that's a

bottleneck that's a limitation function and communication of the body

the signals cannot and develop and be generated the way that they should and

that's a different seminar will take a whole a whole seminar on on that part

alone then so overall that that concludes what we have to talk about for

tonight we try to keep it simple and brief and lastly we would like you to

think about anyone that you know who would like to feel better I think that

should be 99% of the population that can benefit from because most of them never

got a user manual and we're trying to compile one piece by piece here for you

so we want to thank you very much for your attendance and if you have any

questions we'll be happy to take some questions at this point