More Takeaways from AES on How We Eat

I am collecting all of my notes and pictures of things the doctors shared during my weekend at the Autism Education Summit. I was writing fast and furious, taking pictures of their slide show presentations so I didn't have to copy everything I wanted. I am going to be converting all of those notes and images into a file so I can print it off and put it in my notebook in a more legible form.

As I was doing that I came across two phrases that really spoke to me that weekend and they continue to do so. I wanted to share them with you.

From here

So many of us have heard through the years, "you are what you eat". This is not exactly true. In fact, it's so shallow it borders on untruth. Two different doctors spoke that weekend that said two different things that go very nicely together.

"You are what your eat eats that you can't excrete". - Dr. Amy Meyers

Think about what your food is eating. If you don't know what your food ate, you need to know. You might be truly disgusted once you learn. I live in a farming community. I don't have to guess what's being fed to these animals. I watch it happen. All I can say is, GROSS. I wouldn't want to eat what they are, ever.

The problem is, you aren't just eating what you put into your mouth, but also what they put into their mouths AND you may or may not be excreting the harmful things they ate. So, you say "so what if that cow was dosed up with so much antibiotic it was a walking pharmacy, that's not me, I am very, very cautious with using them in my life". Yeah, well, you just took a big mouthful with your grilled chicken last night, and you wonder why you have gut problems.

Next, "We are what we digest and absorb".

This goes so well with the other doctor's quote because if you aren't excreting it, you are usually absorbing it. That's not a good thing with many of the foods we eat these days. Oh, that chicken might be nice and fresh, but nice and fresh with what in it's system. We also are often not digesting our food no matter how high it's quality. If you aren't digesting it, you aren't using it, therefore you aren't getting the nutritional benefit of that food. We can fill our tummies with organic, whole, wonderfully nutrient rich foods, but if we aren't digesting it properly and then absorbing it, we have expensive poop. Now, while poop is very important (and a topic I will actually talk about later), I want cheap poop. I want poop that is void of all the wonderful goodness I put in my mouth. I want it to be only the barest of what my body couldn't use or if I put too much of a nutrient in my body and, with it's wonderful processing abilities, it just didn't need that much. We need to know if our body is digesting and using it's food.

If you aren't sure (and just because you don't have explosive diarrhea or have a little weight to lose doesn't mean you are doing a good job using your food), please talk to a functional medicine or biomedical doctor. They can do very simple, nearly painless tests to figure it out pretty quickly. You might need something as small as a digestive enzyme with your meals. But, you want to make sure you have one that's specific to your needs. If you aren't dealing with fats correctly, one that ignores fats and works on gluten is not going to be as much help.

So, change what you eat. Know your food and the source of your food (that's really not hard in this day and age of phones and internet). Then make sure your body is using that food well and properly.

Talk soon.