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Moving on. I’m going to warn you ahead of time, this post is super nerdy. I like to know the why behind things, and I’m assuming that at least some of my readers do as well so I just wanted to give a brief explanation of why nutrition is so important. If it isn’t your thing, feel free to skip. Really, don’t skip it just suck it up so you have something to make you sound smart at Thanksgiving dinner.
It drives me absolutely insane when people say “you gotta die somehow” or “people have been eating X, Y, or Z food for years.” No shit. I’ve been in college for 7 years, somehow I’ve gathered that people eventually die. I don’t eat the way I do because I am trying to live forever. Who in their right mind wants to watch everyone they love die? Not me. I eat the way I do because I want to feel good and be active for as long as I am alive whether that is 40 or 140. You can be active and healthy your whole life. There are people in their 80s that run marathons. “Good genes” you say and yeah, it is good genes but nutrition has the ability to alter the expression of your genes.
Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression. Wikipedia that shit if you don’t believe me, it’s a fact. You know what- here is the link, silver platter and all. Our genes contain an extraordinary amount of information but we don’t utilize it all at once. Let’s look at this from a nutritional perspective- we can use the enzyme lactase as an example. Brace yourself, I’m about to get nerdy. Lactase breaks down the sugar found in milk. At birth, lactase enzymes are vitally important so infants have the ability to digest breast milk. As a child grows and eats more solids and less milk the body begins producing less lactase because it is no longer needed. It would be wasted energy to keep making lactase enzymes. (This is why the majority of the adult population across the world is lactose intolerant). Our bodies are efficient machines, they don’t want to waste energy on bullshit tasks. But what exactly flipped that switch telling our genes to stop making lactase? What we ate.
Lactase is merely one example of thousands of way the nutrients we consume can alter the expression of certain genes. Want another one? Vitamin D. Osteoblasts are the cells which build bones. We need vitamin D for our genes to express the osteoblast-creating part of our DNA. So get some F’ing vitamin D in food and in sunshine. Come at me dermatologists, I ain’t scurred.
But really these are tiny examples. I could give you billions. Here is another- pregnant women are prescribed folic acid to prevent neural tube defects in children. Why? Because you need folic acid for rapid cell production and growth, like when a fetus is developing. It is a monumental waste of energy and nutrients for our bodies to produce a fetus that will not survive. The purpose of the human race is to pass our genes on. Confession- I really just wanted to find a way to insert fetus into a post and oh my gosh, next time I do I promise to make it less of a tangent.
My point is good nutrition is not just important because it helps you to lose weight or stay thin and healthy. It is important because good nutrition turns on transcription of genes we want and shitty nutrition turns on genes of things we don’t want like cancer, depression and acne. Woof. So stop thinking you can exercise away a bad diet and stop thinking that it’s okay to eat like shit as long as you only eat 1200 calories per day, because it aint.
As much as I want to keep going I’ll do you a favor and shut up but do me a favor- if you at least made it through this whole thing and it made sense to you let me know. If you have questions or want to know more I would love nothing more than to get all Bill Nye the Science Guy on you. And if it didn’t and you don’t give a shit let me know that too so I don’t write anything like this ever again. After all, I am here for you. I promise to make next time more fun. Please forgive me for being so geeky.