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All too often, when it comes to learning about nutrition and changing one’s diet, people focus too much on the nutrients, or which ones to avoid. However, humans eat food, delicious food. Food is part of culture, and eating is part of being social. So as you go through this book, please see food as food (and fuel), not as isolated undesirable numbers. That said, food is made up of nutrients, many of them, and how they are structured in any food determines how it is digested, at what speed, and how it affects your hormones and genes. It’s the structure of food, not the nutrients themselves, that determines a nutrient’s pathway through the body. As you read this book, you’ll learn which foods will serve you better during your athletic endeavors (see chapter 8 for mountain sport–specific nutrition recommendations).

Food contains an array of nutrients—from macronutrients (fats, carbs, proteins) to micronutrients (water, vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients). For food to enter into your system, your body has to break it down into smaller and smaller components that are then absorbed. Once digested food is absorbed, your cells use it to carry out essential processes. At the cellular level, the body can’t determine whether an amino acid came from grass-fed meat or from a fast-food meat patty. However, if the quality of the food is high, your body will respond better because high-quality foods are more nutrient dense and don’t contain unnecessary chemicals (see chapter 13 for information on sourcing your food).