Welcome to Straight Talk on Health. I’m your host Dr. Chet Zelasko. Straight Talk on Health is a joint production with WGVU in Grand Rapids MI. I examine the practical application of health information. Nutrition. Exercise. Diet. Supplementation. I look at the science behind them and let you know whether it’s something to consider or not. You can check out other things that I do on my website Drchet.com and sign up for my free emails.
It all began simply enough. I received an email from someone who was convinced that there was a nutritional solution to a health issue that she was having. I thought about that for a couple of months—not her condition but the question in general. Here’s my answer.
Nutrition cannot fix everything, whether with a change in diet or the addition of a supplement. Period. I’m going to give you several reasons why nutrients can’t fix every problem in our body and finish up with what nutrition can do for you.
Let’s start with baggage. That includes everything that you’ve ever done to or with your body, good, bad, or neutral, over your life up to this point. The cigarettes you’ve smoked, even though you quit years ago. The muscles you’ve torn and ankles you’ve sprained. The weight you’ve gained and lost. I could go on but the point is that you cannot undo everything you’ve done to yourself by eating a special diet or taking a supplement.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t improve some of the symptoms that are the bothering you as a result of that baggage you bring with you. You can feel a whole lot better than you do today. You can’t completely undo the years of poor eating and health issues you have behind you, but you can feel better and have more energy if you eat less and eat better.
Another reason that nutrition can’t fix everything: our microbiome, the bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microorganisms that live on and in our bodies. From birth, our microbiome is the result of contact with our mothers and others, our environment, and the foods we eat and don’t eat. It’s also the result of the antibiotics we’ve taken when we’re sick as well as those that have been in the foods we’ve eaten that can impact the health of the microbiome.
Why not just take a probiotic? Great, but they do not contain all the bacteria we need. Most contain several varieties but there are at least 6,500 different microbes identified—so far. We haven’t identified which ones are essential for every need. It’s a beginning, but to think it’s enough isn’t justified at this point.
Another reason nutrition can’t fix everything is environmental. You might think I’m talking about pesticides, herbicides, plastics, and a whole host of chemicals that we’re exposed to in our lifetime and you would be correct. PFAS and microplastics are the most recent threat from our environment. But there are also things that we don’t think about. If you have a faulty furnace, it could be releasing excess carbon monoxide into your home. Not enough to kill you but enough to reduce your blood oxygen levels. There is no nutritional fix for that. It’s also a good idea to have a CO monitor.
Another is sunshine. Your skin is obvious but what about your eyes? Excess exposure to the eyes can cause cataracts, an oxidation of the lens of the eye. I’ve recently been diagnosed with them. Again, cataracts can’t be fixed by nutrition or a supplement. Once it’s damaged, it has to be replaced. Thankfully, we have surgery that can fix such damage.
The baggage we bring, our microbiome, and the environment seem like a lot but we’re not done yet. Time is a factor that we cannot change. There are changes within our body in everything from muscle to hormones to bone density that are a function of age. Even if we never smoked, always ate perfectly, exercised with no injuries, time marches on and it changes our bodies. Good nutrition can certainly help but there are no diets nor supplements that can stop the progress of age on our bodies. Slow down? Maybe. Reverse? Not going to happen.
As an aside, that’s why I think medical practices that promote anti-aging medicine are just plain foolish. If you want a face lift or tummy tuck, it can’t change the gravity that effects your body nor the natural hormones that are not being produced. They can give you hormones like testosterone or Human Growth Hormone to help you lose fat and increase muscle mass. But remember this: Everything comes with a price. HGH may help you reduce fat mass but we don’t know what negative effects it could have. Could it accelerate the production of tumors? No one has ever checked. There is a reason that HGH production declines as we age. I’m not suggesting there are issues but if no one has ever looked, how do we know it doesn’t?
Let’s turn to food. Food is different today than it has been. I’m not just talking about GMO foods and ultra-processed foods. Every food is bred to be bigger, have more flavor, be more resistant to disease and pests, and last longer on shelves. The carrots of today are not the carrots or yesteryear. I’m not saying that they are bad and that we should only eat heirloom or organic vegetables and fruits. But the concentration of nutrients may not be the same as they used to be. This may be a minor point but when plants are designed to grow faster to get two or even three crops per growing season, that may affect nutrient levels.
The final reason is the primary reason why nutrition can’t fix everything: genetics. All things being equal, genetics—specifically minor mutations in our genes called Single nucleotide Peptides—is probably the biggest reason why nutrition can’t fix everything. Here’s an example. For someone with celiac disease, a genetic test can confirm the diagnosis. Once confirmed, the person should no longer eat any foods with gluten to avoid digestive issues. No other food, nutrient, enzyme, or probiotic can repair the gene. Nutrition can’t fix it.
In another podcast, I talked about having glaucoma. It’s an inherited disease. My mother had it. There are no nutrients or supplements that can fix it. That doesn’t mean that eating fish with omega-3s and carrots and broccoli with beta-carotene won’t help with eye health, but they cannot reverse the glaucoma.
Those are pretty clear examples, but let me give you one that may be vague. Your body makes glucosamine and you can also take it as a dietary supplement. One of the things that happens next is that two glucosamine molecules are joined via an enzyme reaction to make chondroitin. If we have a mutation in the gene that produces that enzyme, we may not make as much chondroitin; in that case making or taking glucosamine doesn’t help, but taking chondroitin may. What gene is responsible? We don’t know yet.
There are thousands of enzyme actions that take place in the body every second. Some work at optimal levels while others may not. The right nutrients may help with symptoms, and they may help with some problems, but they cannot fix every problem. As research progresses, there will be new fields that may help with gene repair to actually fix the problems.
For now, we just do the best we can given what we know today. Eat less. Eat better. Move more. That can help us have the best and most optimal body we can have in spite of the reasons I’ve outlined in this podcast. Nutrition just can’t fix everything but it can help us be better than we are today.
That’s all the time I have for this episode. If you like this podcast, please hit the share button and tell your friends and colleagues about it. Until next time, this is Dr. Chet Zelasko saying health is a choice. Choose wisely today and every day.
