Читать книгу Eat Green! - Joachim Dr. med. Mutter - Страница 19

More than 100 years ago the German nutritionist Dr. Carl von Voit and his students Max von Pettenkofer and Wilbur Atwater came to the conclusion that the human is a combustion engine; and a combustion engine could only work if energy (for the sake of heat production) is ingested through food. The value of food was hence measured according to its calorie content. The more calories the food has the better. The amount of thermal energy that a human could produce from the nutrients, carbohydrates, fats and proteins, was determined in a measurement chamber financed by the Bavarian King Ludwig II.

One calorie is the amount of heat that heats a liter of water from 14.5 °C to 15.5 °C.

Fascinated by the measurements of von Voit, the American W. Atwater soon returned to the US. According to his assumption, it was only the energy content of food that is important for humans. Granted by the United States Department of Agriculture, he published a “guide” for foods that described how many calories could be bought for just 25 cents: 645 calories in the form of eggs, 2020 calories of milk, 2850 calories of cheese, 9095 calories in the form of sugar, 10285 calories in the form of wheat flour, 13720 calories in the form of corn flour.

Following this thought process, you must assume that it is pointless to eat calorie-poor eggs, fruits or vegetables while for much less money you could purchase a much greater amount of calories (in the form of sugar, wheat flour or corn flour). A heating system (back then, this is what the human body was regarded to be) does not use the expensive “mahogany wood” but rather cheap and calorie rich heating fuel.

It was only later that people realized that substances without calories were essential for a healthy life. This was first stated by the professor of physiology Gustav von Bunge from Basel in Switzerland, his famous student Emil Abderhalden and finally by Casimir Funk in his publication Vitamins in 1912 (Nobel Prize winner).

Later it was discovered that even the smallest trace of elements such as copper, manganese, molybdenum, chromium, zinc, iron, selenium or strontium had to be included in the diet so that the human and his subsequent generations could stay healthy and would not become extinct.

Up to the present day, many more micronutrients in our diet were discovered, so called “vital substances” (in German “Vitalstoffe”), as they were named by the Rostock Professor Dr. Werner Kollath (nutritionist and pioneer of the wholefood nutrition, 1892–1970). These also include active enzymes and the dietary fibers that up until recently were deemed to be useless. These are fibrous substances that are found in natural plants (not in animal products).

More micronutrients and macronutrients such as native proteins, native essential fatty acids and thousands of in part still unknown plant auxiliaries were found in unprocessed foods.

Further, in 2011, it was even proven that active genetic substance (so-called microRNA) finds its way into the body through nutrition. These can steer up to 30 % of our genetic material (DNA) in a health promoting manner. In the liver, for example, they induce a kind of “genetic switch” that reduces the amount of the harmful LDL cholesterol in the body.¹⁰ The genetic material ingested through food appears to – in the best case – be a rejuvenation for our body cells. Some therapists, for example, employ plant buds as stem cell inducers for healing.

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Calorie-rich foods generally lose most of their micro- and macronutrients during refining and peeling processes. This industrial processing of food has to this day cost the lives of billions of people or caused them to be ill. For example, they died (and still do) from vitamin deficiency syndromes such as scurvy (vitamin C), beriberi (vitamin B1), pellagra (vitamin B3 or tryptophan) and pernicious anemia (vitamin B12). Or they were (and are) not affected by absolute deficiencies but only from a “reduced supply” of micro- and macronutrients which over years and decades imperceptibly caused damages and as a consequence developed the classical widespread diseases that we know and fear today.