More about the physiology of the human cell

In order to function properly, each cell in our body has very specific raw materials requirements. These nutrient raw materials enable each cell to perform its specific metabolic task. As a result of healthy and normal metabolism, each cell produces beneficial products, and each cell also produces waste products that are detrimental and toxic to the host cell.

These toxic waste products must be identified, neutralized, and eliminated on a regular basis or the host cell will get sick, degenerate, and die. If the cell replicates (divides or gives birth to offspring cells) in a condition of unresolved toxicity, or unrepaired damage, or if it is weak, sick, or dis-eased, it will pass on these irregularities to the offspring cells. This situation can lead to the continuous replication of abnormal or irregular cells within tissues and organs of the body.

Vigilant quality control--in the form of conscientious monitoring of the incoming raw materials and the outgoing products and waste products of our little cellular factories--is one of the keys to health. When cells are healthy, the symptoms of health are manifested in abundance…physical energy, mental clarity, good moods, better digestion, no aches and pains, etc.

When cells are not healthy, the symptoms of cellular dis-ease begin to show…fatigue, aches and pains, inattention, confusion, depression, mood swings, indigestion, etc. The cells of our body are constantly sending messages to the cells of our brain to make sure the brain is aware of how all the little factories are doing. Think of the brain as the inspector general for all those trillion-plus factories. Are we listening? Are we in communication with the inspector general in our own body/brain/mind? How do we respond to the various calls we get on a daily basis from the cells to the inspector general? How are we communicating with our own internal cellular communication system?

According to our factory metaphor: How do we stay healthy?

1. Choose only the highest quality raw materials for fuel, repair, and building supplies. This is the area of diet and nutrition and involves all the interconnected areas of food selection and storage, meal planning and preparation, chewing and digestion, transit time and elimination. Eat the best foods, drink the best water and other beverages, take the best supplements.

2. Maintain the balance between incoming raw materials and outgoing products and waste products. This is the area of movement and rest and exercise. Exercise includes all the vital habits that join forces to deliver nutrients to the cells and to carry waste from the cells and out of the body. Movement and rest, proper breathing and hydration, bending and stretching skeletal muscles, proper chewing and peristalsis (the proper moving of the intestinal muscles) and digestion, transit time and elimination. All the various nutrients and toxins make their way into cells and are carried away from cells (once properly identified and neutralized), primarily through the active circulation of blood and lymph. Our blood circulates in very well-defined channels of arteries, veins, and capillaries…with the heart muscles being the activating pump responsible for proper circulation. Please note: we have twice as much lymphatic fluid in our body as blood…and there is no lymphatic pump equivalent to the heart. Lymphatic fluids contain lymphocytes, which are the cells that make up the major cellular constituents of our immune system. The primary purpose and most important reason to exercise regularly is to make sure you are effectively circulating your lymphatic fluid. In other words: You are the pump for your lymphatic fluid! No matter how well you eat and drink, if you do not exercise you do not move your lymphatic fluid. If you do not move your lymphatic fluid (effectively), you are not succeeding in delivering all the nutrients to all your cells and you are not succeeding in carrying all those toxic wastes away from your cells. You do not have to become an aerobics champion or martial artist or marathon runner. You just have to move…regularly, consistently, effectively. Walking twenty minutes a day may be all you need to do.

3. Exercise vigilant quality control of the factory. This is the area of mindfulness. This is the area of personal responsibility. This is where the value of being proactive in your own self-education and self-care really shows. You are not only the Inspector General for all those trillion-plus cellular factories, you are the boss, the CEO…the buck stops with you! So, extending our factory metaphor just a little bit longer… What kind of CEO of your own body do you want to be? Some suggestions: Do only what serves to produce the most desirable products and waste products from your factory. Make responsible, ecological choices every day. Reduce, reuse, and recycle whenever possible! Be fully present at all times to nourish, strengthen, and acknowledge everyone and everything that contributes to the health and well-being of the factory. Implement innovative proposals and ideas. Reward all complementary habits! Consistently praise every factory worker at every level, every day for their tireless and awe-inspiring work ethic…24-7-365…throughout your entire life! Avoid insulting habits. Practice complementary habits. Find and do the things that nourish you best!

The saying that our body is our temple goes back a very long way. And all temples, like all buildings, are built upon foundations. Imagine that the cells of our body make up the materials that go into the construction of the foundations of our temple. Imagine that our body is a house, and that the cells of our body make up the foundation of that house. If our foundations are strong, much can be built upon them. If our foundations are weak, whatever we build, or attempt to build, will all come tumbling down eventually.

Over the course of many years we have had the opportunity to examine many foundation walls. We have discovered many cracks and gaps but only three major categories that all these gaps and cracks can easily fall into:

1. Nutrition Gaps
2. Information Gaps
3. Integrity Gaps

Identifying the gaps in our biological foundations

During the remainder of our journey to better nutrition we will be identifying these gaps. These gaps are related to all the complementary and insulting habits in the rest of our diet and lifestyle. By taking action to change the insulting habits that have caused these gaps, we will begin the exciting process of effectively filling them in. We simply need to direct our focus and attention on identifying complementary and biomodulating habits and then implement them consistently and effectively! By doing so we will restore the health of our biological foundation and move confidently in the direction of optimum health and well-being.

Nutrition Gaps

The quality of our incoming raw materials has been seriously compromised. During the last few generations, not only has there been a thorough and systematic alteration, degradation, and destruction of the environment, but there has also been a series of bizarre technological innovations in the areas of cooking, processing, preserving, fortifying, and packaging of our foods that can only be described as a giant leap backwards when measuring the various negative impacts on our health. "The real test of the value of refined (fortified) foods would be to put a group of lab animals on a diet of white bread and compare them to a group fed a diet of whole-grain bread. In one such experiment, two thirds of the rats kept on a diet of enriched white bread died before the experiment was finished." (Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, United States Senate. Dietary Goals for the United States, 1977.)

"I am thoroughly convinced that the Perfect American Diet is mere fiction. I do not think it is possible, much less likely, that anyone can consume adequate amounts of balanced nutrients in an unsupplemented diet. I have tried, and have been unable to do so and remain healthy. The increased health and happiness in our family brought on by good nutrition has been worth every penny. Good nutrition does not cost…it pays!" (from the book Nutrition, Health and Disease by Gary Price Todd, M.D.)

Too many people find themselves overfed, yet undernourished. This causes people to endlessly consume excessive amounts of various insulting foods and insufficient amounts of complementary foods. Re-establishing a steady flow of the highest quality whole foods and whole food supplements into our bodies and into our cells is the very best way to fill in our Nutrition Gaps.

Information Gaps

Think about the dizzying assortment of print, radio, television, and Internet ads and commercials, celebrity sound bites, late breaking news stories, cutting edge research reports, doctor's recommendations, and the advice from various health and nutrition experts (and non-experts!) that we have seen and heard in our lifetime. Where's the common ground? Where do all the experts agree?

The truth is, among the so-called experts, there seems to be very little agreement and almost no discernible common ground. The truth is, you can probably find any number of clinical studies and experts to either support or refute just about any health claim ever made. Where does this leave the rest of us? It leaves us eating and digesting an information diet filled with conflict and controversy.

Like our actual food, water, and air supplies, our information diet is often poisoned and polluted on the one hand, and incomplete, inconsistent, and insubstantial on the other. The result of all this misinformation? Uncertainty.

This uncertainty is at the root of so much suffering in our world today. Because of such a poor information diet, most modern people experience a fundamental uncertainty about what to eat and why. This is a distinct cultural and historical aberration particularly unique to the last 150 years or so. If it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. Imagine being an adult and not knowing the most basic answer to the question: What are the best foods to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?

Throughout history, most people have not been in conflict on a daily basis about what to eat and why. Food was food! By and large, people ate what was available to them according to the season, their local geography and climate, and their own particular ethnic, ancestral traditions. Today all of this has changed. Our multi-cultural marketplace of goods and services has simply given us too many choices. To whom can we turn for agreement and consensus on the topic of what to eat and why? This uncertainty runs contrary to one of our deepest and most basic of all human instincts: the desire to be nourished and to nourish others with food. This uncertainty creates stress at a very deep level of our being. It is a stress that is rarely identified. Consequently, it eats away at us, as all negative stress does, and we begin to manifest the ill effects of a strange, unnatural internal erosion, leading to gaps in our physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual foundations.

Re-establishing a steady flow of accurate, vital information in the context of purposeful dialogue and conversation is the very best way to fill in our Information Gaps.

Integrity Gaps

Integrity Gaps are caused when we actually know what to do to be healthier, but we don't do it! We know we should exercise more regularly. We know we should eat more slowly, chew better, and not eat late at night. We know we should not drink so much coffee and alcohol. Since we are weakened by the ill effects of Nutrition Gaps on the one hand and Information Gaps on the other, is it any wonder? It is difficult to maintain discipline and integrity in the area of diet and nutrition when you are feeling overfed, undernourished, misinformed, uncertain, stressed-out, and more than a little bit frustrated about the whole subject of nutrition and health. Do you know what we mean?

The purpose of our work together in the days, weeks, and months ahead is to learn what habits and influences in our diet and lifestyle have caused the gaps in our own biological foundation to occur, and then to take the corrective actions to restore them. By doing this we will make our biological foundations healthy and strong and whole again. This is the purpose of the Functional Nutrition approach to health. This is the purpose of the Journey to Better Nutrition described in these online pages. To facilitate this ongoing process of learning and doing we will focus our attention on two key areas:

1. Biological principles that regulate the functions of our physiology
2. The habits in our diet and lifestyle that either complement or insult these principles and most basic functions

Biological Principle Number One: Homeostasis

Homeostasis is the term that describes the dynamic mechanisms within the human body that maintain constant conditions and regulate all internal functions: the beating of our heart; the production of saliva, enzymes, and hormones; the healing of cuts and bruises; the oxygenation of cells; the expiration of carbon dioxide from our lungs; the production of insulin and cholesterol; the pH of our blood; the peristaltic motions of our small and large intestines; the constancy of our internal body temperature…to name a few.

Homeostasis is the miracle of balance and harmony that exists inside every cell, tissue, organ, and system of the human body. Homeostasis is the natural intelligence within our own body that knows exactly what to do to get us well and keep us well. Homeostasis is most evident, most inspiring, and perhaps most astonishing when we observe the inner workings of our little cellular factories: our cells.

Our bodies, and every organ, tissue, and system within our bodies, build themselves from single cells, and renew themselves through the constant interchange of food, water, and air. We can say that our bodies are like houses, in that houses are made from bricks, and bodies are made from cells, but the comparison would fall far short of the miraculous truth. For our body is born from one cell, as if the house could be built from one brick…a magic brick that would set about manufacturing other bricks. These new bricks, without waiting for the architect's drawings or the arrival of the bricklayers, would somehow assemble themselves and begin to form walls and floors and ceilings. These magical bricks would also metamorphose into window panes, roofing-slates, coal for heating, and water for the kitchen and bathroom. Our bodies develop by means such as those attributed to fairies in the tales told to children in bygone times. This magnificent construction of our bodies emanates from the unknowable wisdom inside each individual cell, which, to all appearances, possesses a knowledge of the future edifice and synthesizes from substances present in our blood and lymph, not only the building materials, but the workers themselves! (Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown, 92)

Our job is to cooperate with the miraculous cells inside our own body and to do the things that nourish us best. The principle of homeostasis teaches us that nothing is neutral. Everything we do, eat, drink, think, and say is either complementary to our homeostasis and health, or it is insulting and actively destructive to our health.

We repeat: nothing is neutral. Everything is either complementary or insulting to the proper care, design, and function of the human body.

Knowing the difference between which influences in our lives are complementary and which are insulting is one of the most important things we will ever learn. Practicing the complementary habits and avoiding or minimizing the insulting habits is the surest path to the experience of optimum health and well-being. More information about these "habits" can be found here: The Habits of Naturally Healthy People.

Complementary Habit Number One: Be Proactive!

Being proactive means taking more complete personal responsibility for our own actions and our own results. It is the most important choice we can make, and we need to make it and remake it every day of our lives. We believe it is easier to make this choice and remake this choice with a deeper and clearer understanding and appreciation of how the human body works, in particular how cells work, as we have just seen. Aren't the cells of the human body amazing? Of course they are! When the fog of confusion and uncertainty hanging over our own personal river of doubt clears, we find ourselves not only knowing what to do to nourish ourselves best, but eager and happy to do it. We know what the alternatives are! Been there. Done that. Right?

"I don't think what people are looking for is the meaning of life. I think what people are looking for is the experience of being more fully alive!" (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth)

Being proactive is a cornerstone of the Functional Nutrition paradigm. Functional Nutrition is a reference to the foods, supplements, and habits that, working together, restore normal physiological functions in our body. This results in the experience of vitality, energy, and health. Functional Nutrition reminds us that no one will ever know your own body better than you do. Being proactive means that we live our lives in a constant spirit of experimentation and choice; learning by doing. What we need to learn are the complementary habits that nourish us best. What we need to do is to practice them consistently and gradually, master them. Health is the result of this exciting and never-ending process. Your successful Journey to Better Nutrition depends upon your understanding of and your commitment to this transformational educational process.