Nutrition
You Must Eat for Your Brain!
Your brain is your most valuable organ—and it requires the right nutrients. Why animal products are essential for your cognitive function.
Nutrition
Your brain is your most valuable organ—and it requires the right nutrients. Why animal products are essential for your cognitive function.
Line items
Who or what are we eating for, really? There are many misconceptions on this topic. Looking purely at the physical level, we eat for two essential reasons:
Most people seem completely unaware that we have an incredibly large, metabolically active brain. Everything that humans have created in this world comes from that lump of fat between our ears. This brain is what makes us human. And indeed, this brain controls everything in our body – even what happens in our muscles. When we look at energy metabolism, we see that the brain can actually regulate it systemically.
And the brain is what stands between the world and you. Because everything that acts as a stimulus on your body is captured in the form of senses and processed in the nervous system – but even more so in the brain. Recently, research has shown that "our sensations are determined not only by incoming sensory information streams, but also by our internal bodily state, which seems to refute the notion that our sensations are objective and unbiased."
Aha! Oh! That would mean that for us as an individual, there are no truly objective, perceivable facts out there. That makes sense. We experienced this quite vividly during the Corona crisis. Watching how some (or many) people perceived things, you could only shake your head. But: that is their reality – who are we to say that their reality is better or worse than mine? Here we drift into philosophy.
What seems important is this: "You think as you eat." Because it's clear that if we don't feed the body well, the system can't process information properly – which means that we – to put it mildly – think up nonsense. And at this point, we absolutely believe that many of the confusion and delusion in our society comes from the fact that many of us are poorly nourished and consequently have errors in our own perception, feelings, and analytical thinking.
Unfortunately, there's a small biological secret: we constantly find ourselves in either upward or downward spirals. That is, once the brain starts making the wrong decisions because it's sick, you can assume it will become even sicker and our cognition increasingly impaired. And so it must happen that the gap between those in good health and those not widens inevitably, until finally you might not even understand each other anymore.
That's the only way to explain some of the phenomena in our society that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. For some of what we see today, one might have previously recommended a psychiatric clinic. Those who criticize this today are fought back against, labeled as conservative or... well, we've developed quite a few labels for such people in our society.
In any case, it's fair to say that until a few years or decades ago, it was still completely normal to eat animals. Strictly speaking, without that it would have been almost impossible to survive in Switzerland – without coconuts, soy schnitzel, and such:
Most people were robust and healthy with what was available locally – you might say it was quite "regional." This was also observed by Weston Price a hundred years ago. He documented that people who lived reasonably naturally on whatever was locally available were very robust, healthy, and psychologically stable – and they also had very good teeth. Weston Price showed that every culture he visited had a minimum amount of such nutrient-dense animal products in their diet.
The problem is: we modern people cannot really understand what it means for human physiology that we ate animal products for three million years. The body is calibrated for exactly that:
(Articles on all these points can be found via search on our blog.)
There is evidence that clearly shows we humans have been consuming all of this for millions of years. At the same time, our skull capacity has tripled, and our brain accordingly. Modern genetic analyses show that synthesis pathways in our biochemistry have atrophied so much that we can no longer produce many of these substances in sufficient quantities ourselves. And yet there are people who are convinced of the opposite, who eat like a rabbit or a bird, who become increasingly radical in their judgment of the world, who perceive the world as increasingly evil and corrupt.
The sad truth is likely that in most of these cases, their own brain – and their own body – is undernourished. Of course, these very people will be afraid of every virus and its consequences, because the body loses its robustness. And this lost robustness in us is what causes us to shape and adapt the world around us in such a way that the genetic mismatch paradoxically keeps growing larger. That is, the body actually needs life's hardship to be healthy and stay healthy through hormesis.
Only people who still have a spark of physical and psychological robustness can understand this. The rest will increasingly go into a defensive posture and begin to fight – whether directly or indirectly – those who don't see things this way.
It's not about eating a "carnivore" diet. It's not about eating mostly animals. And of course, it's always about preferring quality. But ultimately, each of us should eat animal products regularly. Only then can you expect a human body to stay healthy.
