Does seeing your nutrition as a form of money align with modern-day views of how our diet makes a difference?
About three patients in this morning, before I started writing this, I heard a familiar nutrition-based request. “I want to know if I’m getting what I need from my diet.”
I hear this request so often I devoted a section of this website to it!
After years of helping people break this question down relevant to their situation, I’ve created a framework focusing more long term than the reductionist way of thinking we can get bogged down with focusing on micro and macronutrient intakes.
Nutrition as currency happened quite by accident. By explaining the role that vitamins and minerals play within the nutritional biochemistry landscape in the body, I started using the term transaction. This methodology all started around ten years ago now. Over time, I’ve broadened how looking at your diet and nutrition as you would your finance offers a structure that transcends worrying about the day today.
This article introduces the philosophy of nutrition as currency. Hopefully, you see one of my clinical pillars, nutrition as therapy, in a way that helps you get what you need from your food. Eliminating the worry of whether you are doing the right thing for your health and the health of those that rely on you.
Financial debt and dietary deficiencies in the developed world look remarkably similar.
Ok, so let’s put this into perspective and compare some numbers. On March 1st 2021, the gross federal debt (debt held by the public and the government) in the USA crossed over the $28 trillion line.[1] Credit card debt in the UK reached £72.7 billion in 2018.[2]
Don’t get me wrong, debt can be a necessary part of life in our modern-day. But you don’t have to go too far to find an economist who suggests the global debt issue is a crisis that may only worsen.
Let’s look at some more numbers that could be considered a debt of a different kind. Estimates on the prevalence of fruit and vegetable consumption for 52 countries with varying socioeconomic settings concluded that 78% of men and women consumed less than the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) recommended five servings daily.[3]
The situation in Hong Kong is equally alarming.
The results of surveys released in 2018 found that 94.4% of people above 15 years old had inadequate fruit and vegetable intake.[4] A population health survey from 2014/15 in Hong Kong reported that the estimated mean number of fruits and vegetables consumed was 1.1 servings and 1.4 servings daily.[5]
The dietary intakes of copper, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum and phosphorus of more than 20 per cent of the adult population were inadequate compared to the respective recommended intakes.[6]
The study also concluded that the general adult population consume inadequate intakes of calcium (90% insufficient), iron (80% with less than they need) and potassium (60% with less than they need) due to deficient dietary intakes.[7] That’s akin to deciding that you only want to go about your day using $10 and $50 notes. Sure, you’ve got some denominations, maybe enough to get by. At some stage, though, you might find yourself in an awkward spot.
Can you guess where I’m going with this?
Most citizens in the developed world are not earning enough to pay their bills. Many generally rely on debt to stay afloat, living paycheck to paycheck or both. Causes for this are widespread and very real. A more substantial reality check is choosing short-term survival at the expense of critical long-term transactions and the implications.
Most people are not starving. However, they aren’t getting anywhere near enough dietarily to pay all their metabolic and physiological bills for their body. Sometimes daily. This deficit in vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients (non-nutritive ingredients that are beneficial to the body) highlights an analogous situation where we can’t pay our credit card bills or our body’s bills.
Either way, you look at it; it can be challenging for the majority to get ahead and reach a point where you are investing for your future financially. But when it comes to your diet and nutrition, you have a lot more power in your own hands. First, let’s review some examples of how your body uses vitamins and minerals to build a deeper understanding.
The role that vitamins and minerals play in how your body works
For some patients, this is worth the price of admission alone when we go through this. I’m grateful to be sharing it here for you.
Let’s look at how your body creates energy, brain chemicals and other essential compounds from your protein, carbohydrate and fat intake. When you eat carbohydrates, one of the first things that happen is its deconstruction by the digestion into glucose and other simple sugars.
That glucose is a vital ingredient in the way the body creates energy, and it does so by initiating something called the Citric Acid or Kreb’s cycle. There are multiple steps in changing the glucose molecule to ATP that the cell uses for energy within this cycle.
We’re only going to talk about one of the first steps to illustrate our point.
For glucose to go one step further in turning into energy, the body needs to pay for this transaction by using Vitamin B1, B2, B3 and B5 and Lipoic Acid as anti-oxidant support. That’s just one step.
Interestingly, this same combination pays for the transactions that allow amino acids from protein to enter the same energy production process.
Imagine thousands of those transactions within your brain, organs and tissues. All of these transactions require similar combinations of vitamins and minerals to have their transactions paid. Some vital nutrients can be created within the body, granted. Overall, though, the body relies on supply to come from the diet or supplementation if you have the luxury.
What happens when the body can’t pay its bills?
I’m hoping that this is starting to come together. Previously, we compared financial debt to a dietary deficiency in the sense that, in both situations, we see them born out of there not being enough money to cover immediate expenses.
I used to tell the story of being a natural medicine student, working and studying full time, deciding which bills to pay first. I can tell you the choice was simple; it was largely down to which bill had been overdue the longest. I had no sense of managing my financial budget in a way that would cover all the bills as they came in. Let alone trying to save for a rainy day. I just wanted to avoid my internet getting turned off or my mobile phone getting locked.
Getting into this situation with your diet is easy. The good news is that you can make some different choices today, tomorrow, or the next day that will almost immediately affect getting your body’s bills paid.
Prioritising the short term over the long game can lead to undesirable consequences with your money and your diet
A study from Bankrate suggests that 39% of people don’t save anything because their expenses don’t allow it.[8] This situation explains what’s happening to those high percentages of people who don’t consume enough fruits and vegetables daily. Sure, their body can pay the expenses required to breathe and create energy, to some extent.
But what happens if the body needs extra resources unexpectedly, such as an infection?
We’ve all heard the statistics around situations people face where they cannot pay for an unexpected bill if it were come to around. If this were to happen, how do these unexpected payments get covered?
Typically, it’s a situation of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Let’s use Zinc, for example. Zinc is often one of the main minerals (think now denominations of currency) used in the fast-dividing cells of the body like hair, skin and nails. More importantly, it has a vital role in the immune system.
Imagine getting an infection that would require your immune system to work overtime. The immune response increases the need for Zinc to pay more transactions to proliferate your immune cells. If you were deficient, the body might have to take Zinc from an alternative process to reallocate it to cover the immune system. Worse still, it simply may not be able to pay the extra transactions at all.
This form of triage is how researchers describe modern-day nutrition and its connection to how not paying your body’s bills in the long-term leads to disease and, in the worst case, death.
Can science help to validate this?
There are many reasons why our current day, whilst plagued with challenges, is considered a golden age of sorts. Sure, we’re not perfect. We’re still grappling with the provision of fundamental human rights in some global regions. But it is also fair to say that in the developed world, we are not starving.
It’s for this reason that our previous modal of diet and nutrition has needed to evolve.
For most of us, you included, deficiency based diseases such as scurvy from Vitamin C deficiency, Beriberi from Vitamin B1 deficiency and Rickets from Vitamin D deficiency are off your list of health concerns. But this has primarily informed how we structure our diets and the intentions behind forming those structures.
It’s easier then to see how this can cause a motivation problem when getting enough fruit and vegetables and their micronutrients. If you have enough Vitamin C not to get scurvy, what’s the problem?
Here is where the work of Professor Bruce Ames and his theory of micronutrient triage comes in.
This theory refers to an aspect of natural selection that favours short-term survival at the expense of long-term health.[9]
Remember the example I mentioned where if the body can’t pay its bills, its automatic decision is to pay for the transactions with the most short-term survival in mind?
It sounds pretty similar from my point of view and makes sense to a large extent. Nature is always predominantly concerned with its survival, so why would our bodies act differently?
One of Professor Ame’s original articles suggests micronutrient deficiencies that trigger his triage theory would accelerate cancer and other late-onset chronic diseases. The same illnesses exacerbated by ageing, neural and mitochondrial decay (Mitochondria help your cells create energy).[10]
Micronutrient Triage is the evolution of how nutrition plays a role in our health, and it puts the power in your hands
As the research continues to reinforce Professor Ames’ work, the implications for how we treat our diets are enormous. Nearly every pathway for our metabolism requires some form of micronutrient currency to pay for it.[11]
Micronutrient triage theory and its evolution deserves a full article so you can dive deeper into exactly how these vitamin and mineral deficiencies cause problems. I hope from this basic introduction, you will be able to answer the question better, “is my diet enough?”
You wouldn’t postpone going to the cash machine if you needed money. Like you wouldn’t try and invest money you didn’t have. Treating your diet and the nutrients that pay for your body’s transactions like you do your finances might have short-term effects that transcend your expectations. Perhaps more importantly, you’ll keep some major diseases away to retire with way more money than you need in the long term.
The best thing? As always, the power is in your hands to make the decisions to make a difference today!
References
[1] https://www.pgpf.org/infographic/the-national-debt-is-now-more-than-28-trillion-what-does-that-mean, viewed 24th November 2021.
[2] https://www.finder.com/uk/debt-statistics, viewed 24th November.
[3] Hall JN, Moore S, Harper SB, Lynch JW. Global variability in fruit and vegetable consumption. Am J Prev Med. 2009;36(5):402-409.e5. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2009.01.029
[4] https://www.chp.gov.hk/files/pdf/ncd_watch_april_2018.pdf, viewed 23rd November 2021.
[5] Population Health Survey 2014/15. Hong Kong SAR: Department of Health, viewed 23rd November 2021
[6] The First Hong Kong Total Diet Study: Minerals, December 2014, Centre for Food Safety, viewed 23rd November 2021.
[7] The First Hong Kong Total Diet Study: Minerals, December 2014, Centre for Food Safety, viewed 23rd November 2021.
[8] https://www.bankrate.com/pdfs/pr/20190314-march-fsi.pdf, viewed 23rd November 2021.
[9] Ames BN. Low micronutrient intake may accelerate the degenerative diseases of aging through allocation of scarce micronutrients by triage. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006;103(47):17589-17594. doi:10.1073/pnas.0608757103
[10] Ames BN. Low micronutrient intake may accelerate the degenerative diseases of aging through allocation of scarce micronutrients by triage. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006;103(47):17589-17594. doi:10.1073/pnas.0608757103
[11] Joyce C McCann, Bruce N Ames, Vitamin K, an example of triage theory: is micronutrient inadequacy linked to diseases of aging?, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 90, Issue 4, October 2009, Pages 889–907, https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.2009.27930
