PART 1 - THE BEST FOOD

The Best Food

We seem able to get away with eating anything we desire. The body is so adaptable and forgiving. It does its best to survive on whatever it's given.

However, the body's forgiveness is not bottomless. If improper food continues beyond the ability to adapt, disease, degeneration, and loss of vitality will result.

Such consequences appear years later, long after the eating habits that caused them. So, people, even medical professionals, do not see the relationship between chronic disease and diet.

Like old bills turning up that you thought you would never have to pay, bad eating habits come back to haunt us. And the damage is not just to us. Epigenetic research shows that poor nutrition alters gene expression in ways that affect the health of our children.


THE BEST FOOD
To know what the best food is, we can trust the food industry, advertising, government food pyramids, dieticians, doctors, mom, or opinions and beliefs. Or we can engage our own reason:

1. All life is genetically designed for certain kinds of food. Every species has a diet aligned with its biology—cows graze, lions hunt, bees collect nectar. Humans are no exception.
2. Most of the foods we are presently exposed to are a product of the Agricultural/Industrial Revolution and occupy a small part of our history.
3. Whatever diet humans ate in our natural, pre-industrial, and pre-agricultural state had to have been the perfect diet, or we would not now exist. Nature is the nutritional womb from which we sprang.

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The only logical conclusion is that the best food for humans is what we can eat and thrive on in its natural state.

That means no dyes, preservatives, synthetics, nutritionally barren cooked starches, or refined sugars and oils. Our tissues are designed to be bathed in food nutrients derived from natural living foods found in nature.

The current epidemic of 110 chronic degenerative diseases is the result of ignoring this simple logic.

The conundrum of which came first, a chicken or an egg can be changed to something more easily solved: Which came first, a chicken or its food.

The answer is, natural food must exist first.

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Instead, we eat industrial artifacts that bear no resemblance whatsoever to anything coming from nature.

We have become exiled from biological truth.

Poet and farmer, Wendell Berry, wrote, "Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels...Food industrialists will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it prechewed into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so...The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach."


WHAT IS NATURAL FOOD
If we only eat cooked and processed foods, we tend toward the devitalized lifeless food we eat.

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We were not suddenly dropped from outer space onto Earth with fry pans and matches. We began in nature, not in a line at a fast-food counter. Every other organism on Earth eats foods exactly like they are found in nature.

All of the mystery about what is or is not proper to eat vanishes if we just imagine ourselves in nature in the total absence of fire and modern technology. Ask yourself the question: What could I eat?

The answer is fruits, nuts, some seeds, insects, a few plants, inner tree bark, honey, worms, grubs, eggs, milk, and animals. These foods are nutrient-dense, enzyme-rich, and recognized by our biology. They require no label or ingredient list.

The predominant human food was prey, the most nutrient-dense food that could be digested. Animal foods supplied complete amino acids, essential fats, vitamins A, D, B12, and minerals otherwise scarce or nonexistent in plants.

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Raw natural foods must be safe or our ancestors would not have survived and we would not exist.


COMPROMISE IS OKAY
It's very difficult today to achieve or accept the ideal natural diet. Our tastes and sensibilities have been trained by industry, not nature. But we can at least steer our choices in that direction. Look around the grocery store (usually the outside aisles) and consider what it is that could be eaten in its natural state. Increase the proportion of free-range, grass-fed, whole, fresh, and organic. Choose processed foods that compromise natural principles the least.

Each level of processing removes another layer of life from food. For example, whole, raw, and organic milk, cheese, and yogurt are ideal. The same thing pasteurized would be next best. The same thing pasteurized and homogenized next. Worst would be non-fat, pasteurized, homogenized, artificially flavored, and sugared versions.

Any cooking should be done lightly or using high heat with short time. These methods are the least destructive to nutrients.

Thankfully, the amazing human body is forgiving if small compromises are made here and there. Just keep the ideal goal in sight and don't worry about veering off the path now and then. The direction matters more than perfection. Every step toward natural food is a step toward natural health.

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PART 2 - OUR LIFE CHOICES GENETICALLY IMPACT OUR CHILDREN

Our Life Choices Genetically Impact Our Children

In today's world of food abundance and endless choices, eating has become a form of recreation. We often know that sugary drinks, refined carbs, and processed foods harm our health--but we rarely think they might harm anyone else.


WHAT IS EPIGENETICS
What's not commonly known is that poor nutrition, toxic exposures, and lifestyle choices can leave genetic marks that are passed to our children through a process called epigenetics.

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Epigenetics refers to how our environment and behavior can affect which genes are turned on or off--without changing the DNA sequence itself. In other words, we are not just the sum of our genes; we are also shaped by how those genes are expressed based on what we eat, do, and experience. Even more striking, malnutrition, toxins, and even chronic stress can alter the epigenetic patterns in sperm and egg cells, which means those changes can be inherited by our children.

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NUTRITION'S DEEPER LEGACY
Nutrient deficiencies can also cause permanent DNA damage that may be passed to future generations. This can happen even when food is plentiful--the "too much of too little" cycle, where diets are high in calories but low in essential nutrients.

Our nutritional, environmental, and lifestyle choices don't end with us. They influence how genes are expressed and how our descendants experience health or disease.


HEALING AND HEALTH ARE INHERITABLE TOO
Fortunately, the story doesn't have to end in harm. Epigenetic changes are often reversible through improved nutrition, detoxification, and a more natural way of living.

Just as damage can be passed down, so can healing. When we nourish ourselves properly and live as nature intended, we give our children and grandchildren a biological inheritance of health and resilience, not illness, incapacity, and suffering.


RESEARCH LINKS
Epigenetic inheritance
Nutrition alters gene expression via methylation and histone modification Transposable elements: targets for early nutritional effects on epigenetic gene regulation DNA damage
Nutrient deficiency causes mutations and chromosomal instability Mitochondrial dysfunction
Maternal nutrient deficits impair mitochondrial DNA and energy metabolism Developmental programming
Fetal adaptation to scarcity predisposes to adult disease Transgenerational effects
Effects seen in grandchildren of exposed individuals

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