I was just translating Chris’ text about his eating and cooking habits today, a contribution for a cooking book for triathletes. As we all know, good food is a very essential part of health and performance. And I think there is not one athlete who does not know about the importance of food for peak performance, but probably few live this premise.
Living it is yet another story
May be a reason for this deficit that nature science has not really been able to understand the physiological processes the various foods induce as a whole? May be another reason that we are so “facts-driven” that we don’t trust our experience, and the experiences of human of hundreds of years?
It does not help to analyse the components of a food to understand its effects as a whole. We cannot simply compile the effects of every single element. The effects are an emergent phenomenon that is more than the addition of the parts – it means that food stuff is complex thing.
Because of this situation for many of us the healthiness of food is a rather vague and arbitrary term. The discrepancy, the split between scientific knowledge and experience is very pronounced in relation to food. The history of science of food is short, but experience dates back into ancient times. From food stuff medicinal products have been extracted ever since. Nowadays we have labs synthesizing compounds we know as ingredients of foods that we have identified as healthy or curing. From a chemical and biochemical viewpoint this products are the same. But there is a difference the compound from the lab are purer, they are mono-substances, they loose the properties of ingredients which are polyvalent. Purity does not necessarily mean better and more efficient. It may even be that the unharmed (healthy) complexity of the ingredients gives food its special power.
Main features of good=healthy food