Vegetable and Fruit Nutrition
An Introduction to the Health Benefits of Fruits and Vegetables
By: Dan Gerhardt, D.C.
It has been said that you cannot step into the same river twice. This is true because the water is always flowing and the river is always changing. The same can be said of the human body, a complex chemical soup, swirling around amidst a firestorm of electrical activity. With each breath, the physical compostion of the body is completely different. Like fallen leaves swirling in a whirlpool of water, the chemical reactions in every cell of the body are replicated in incomprehensible ways. For instance, the acidity of the blood slightly changes on each breath due to minute changes in oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. Some of the body's cells are slowly dividing, expanding, and growing while other cells are slowly shrinking, collapsing, and dying. The inherent wisdom of the body is automatically geared for survival and is constantly working to maintain a balance between cellular death and cellular growth. Too much of one or the other leads to dysfunction and dis-ease.
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The lining of your gut contains a massive amount of tiny blood vessells called capillaries, spread out over a large surface area, but crumpled up into folds with finger-like projections called villi and haustrations. The purpose and function of the gut is to absorb water and nutrients into the blood, where they can be carried to the rest of the body and put to use. Junking-out on highly processed fast-foods and genetically engineered franken-foods gunks up your intestinal 'root system' and prevents the absorption of water and nutrients - just like hard, rocky clay does with your plants. You don't plant your plants in hard, rocky clay, do you? I didn't think so. On the other hand, noshing on healthy, organic, homegrown food does the same for your body as planting in loose, rich, fertile, loamy soil does for the health and well-being of your plants.
All substances ingested by the body are either advantageous, deleterious, or both. Our foods and edibles have the potential to act upon the body as either a fertilizer, a poison, or both. On this site, I would prefer to focus on the health promoting and healing properties of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and herbs.
But let me just say this about the flip side - the heavy use of industrial fertlizers and herbicides has stripped our farmland of macronutrients, micronutrients, and beneficial bacteria that are essential for producing vitamin-rich, vigorous plants. One researcher stated that, as opposed to times past, the amending of today's soil is so often bypassed that the ground is basically just there to hold the plants upright so that the corporate farmers can give them a chemical enema.
Every human body is considered to be something known as an open system. In the natural sciences, an open system is one whose border is permeable to both energy and mass. In physics, a closed system, by contrast, is permeable to energy but not to matter. A closed system contains limited energies, while an open system assumes that there are supplies of energy that cannot be depleted; in practice, this energy is supplied from some source in the surrounding environment, which can be treated as infinite for the purposes of study. An open system is any distinct entity - a cell, a person, a forest, or a planet that takes in resources from its environment, processes them in some way, and then produces an output. To survive, such a system depends on feedback with it's environment, and on interactions between its component parts or subsystems.
One type of open system is the radiant energy system, which receives its energy from solar radiation - an energy source that can be regarded as inexhaustible for all practical purposes. Most seeds grow and thrive when planted in fertile soil, provided with water, and bathed in sunlight. The leaves of the growing plants collect energy from the sun and, with the assistance of the water and minerals gathered from the roots, use this free energy from the sun to make more complicated molecular compounds like sugars, vitamins, and phytonutrients.
The limitless energy of the sun is trapped and stored inside of the plants in the form of the chemical bonds that hold these molecular compounds together. Can you say chlorophyll? This energy is released inside of you when you digest the food that you eat. Make sure to eat plenty of sunshine because this energy is then used by your body to make even more complex tissues like a heart and a brain, which eventually enable you to work, to grow, to heal, to live, and to love.
As they were discovered, scientists began to name the different chemical compounds found in food. One group of these chemical structures were named amines. Certain amines were considered to be of vital importance to the proper functioning of the body and became known as vital amines, commonly known now as vitamins. Foods also contain minerals, enzymes, fiber, and an endless array of phytonutrients and antioxidants with all kinds of funny-sounding names. We will look into all of these things and the physiological effects that they have on your functional health in further detail on other articles here on this website.
I know that you must be enjoying this tremendous gardening website so far. It is my hope and my wish that you not only have yourself a beautiful and successful lawn, landscape, and garden, but that you may also learn to take your precious health out of the hands of the corporate farming and pharmaceutical industries and put it back in it's rightful place, where it belongs - in your own hands.
Until next time, don't forget to eat your fruits and veggies!
Dan Gerhardt, D.C.