How your body uses the different nutrients

Posted on October 7, 2015 by PaoloDS

Here is how your body uses the macronutrients (those needed in larger quantities):

Proteins are used to build the structures, like muscles, nails, hair. These structures give a “shape” to your body, this is the reason why many bodybuilders stress the importance of eating high-protein foods. Some healthy sources of proteins are: legumes, quinoa, fish, eggs, tempeh, unsweetened organic yogurt, unprocessed organic meat.

Carbohydrates are used for energy, which allows your body to move. It’s a good strategy to get carbohydrates in the meals that precede physical exercise (think to athletes who eat a piece of fruit half an hour before performing). Some healthy sources of carbohydrates are: brown rice, fruits and vegetables, raw organic honey, amaranth, sweet potatoes.

Fats are used to build protective layers around organs, to digest fat-soluble vitamins, and as stored energy. It’s an old myth that “fats make you fat”: it’s processed junk foods that make you fat, instead. Fats are vital for your body. Some healthy sources of fats are: extra-virgin olive oil, coconut oil, avocado, nuts like walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, peanuts.

And here is how your body uses the micronutrients (those needed in smaller quantities -but still necessary-):

Vitamins are used for many vital functions, for example they help metabolism, act as antioxidants, regulate cell and tissue growth. It’s important to note that many vitamins are sensitive to heat, so people who sistematically cook their meals at high temperatures (boiling, frying…) “kill” the vitamins and end up with a vitamin-deficient diet.

Minerals are used to build that part of your body which is actually mineral, like bones and teeth, that are made of calcium. They are also employed in many other important processes, for example magnesium supports protein synthesis, sodium controls muscle contraction and nerve function, iron makes hemoglobin in red blood cells that carry oxygen in the body.

Finally, even if sometimes they’re not technically labeled as nutrients or not included in the previous groups, here is how your body uses three other elements of your diet of vital importance:

Fiber is the part of the plants which is not digested in your body, -so it actually survives the entire transit in the intestines-, but it is used to make the feces more airy, soft, so they flow through the intestines easily. Fiber prevents constipation and diarrhea, and it is particularly abundant in the skin of many fruits and vegetables, and in the bran of whole grains.

Phytochemicals, the compounds in fruits and vegetables that are responsible for their organolectic properties (like color and smell), may have a huge number of healthy benefits. Most studies are still cautious, but I “guess” that in the future they will clearly show a strong correlation between phytochemicals and good health / disease prevention. Phytochemicals are very abundant in bright colored vegetables and fruits.

Water makes a significant fraction of the human body (variable from 55% to 75%), and it serves a number of important functions, for example: it regulates body temperature by sweating and respiration, lubricates joints, flushes waste in urine, keeps membranes moist, forms saliva, acts as a carrier to distribute essential nutrients to the cells.

Notes: For simplicity I grouped minerals all together in the micronutrients group, however sometimes a separation is made among microminerals (or “trace minerals”) and macrominerals.

Related: Density of nutrients

Important things I learned

Posted on June 26, 2015 by PaoloDS

These are some of the most important things that (I think) I learned, or that I am in the process of learning, in these last years of my life.

Spirituality

● The enormous power of the words thank you.

● The concept of consciousness. That there are different levels of consciousness at which people can live. That also music, movies, art, objects have their level of consciousness.

● It’s not consciousness that is created by matter, but exactly the opposite: matter is created by consciousness.

● Atheism has a fixed point of view, rather sterile. After graduating from the religious non-sense, a further graduation from atheism is possible, and necessary, to progress in the path of spiritual evolution.

● Chronic skepticism is a very counterproductive attitude. I used to be a chronic skeptic before, not believing “in anything”. These days I prefer to keep chronic skeptics at distance.

● I learned some great lessons from Eckhart Tolle’s books, in particular these three:

what being present means, the idea of being here and now. And I realized that only a fraction of the thoughts that flow in my mind are useful. The rest are useless, repetitive, distracting noise.
what the ego is. I realized that I do have an ego, and a terribly difficult one to tame.
the mechanism of drama that drives many human relationships. Most people tend to create unnecessary and avoidable drama, to feed a little “beast” they have inside, a beast that feeds on negative emotions.

Of these three concepts, I think I understand well the theory behind the first two, but I still suck at turning the theory into practice. There are still more unobserved thoughts and more pretense in me than I would like to have. With drama, instead, I think I do well both with theory and practice. I’ve never been a big drama queen.

● The best rule to apply with people who are trying to start drama is: do not engage. Let them scream, gesticulate, cry, while staying absolutely calm, composed, in silence, just replying things like “yes, you’re right”, until they turn off.

● Life is about finding balance in the middle of two types of awareness:

that we, human beings, have an enormous power and control over our lives, and we are able to realize wonderful, huge, sensational things.
that there are things in our lives that we don’t control at all, and those things could destroy everything we built, in any moment.

The trick is to recognize that both are true, but then decide to have faith, and work hard to realize the wonderful things.

● Healing doesn’t correspond to feeling relaxed and comfortable all the time. Healing, usually, happens through pain and struggle.

● The law of attraction makes great sense, however it seems like many people don’t get the part ~~attr~~action of it. After believing that something will happen, it is necessary to work -usually hard- to make it happen.

● Every person can be a hero. Even if most people today consider courage as a trait reserved for movie characters only, everyone can cultivate courage and apply it to real life, this life.

● Life tries to “talk” to us constantly, and tries to teach us lessons all of the time. The people we meet, the events that happen around us, they usually carry a message for us. We must stay receptive, like an antenna, to get the message.

● Dreams deserve much more attention than they’re commonly given: “normal” dreams that we have during sleep, lucid dreams in which we can manipulate the environment -they are a lot of fun-, and also daydreams. It is true that, as I read somewhere, dreams are not meant to make us sleep, but to make us wake up.

● Jesus Christ, probably, never existed as an historical figure. He is a fictional character that was invented by the ancient Romans, as a tool of propaganda to dominate the Jews of their times. I heard about this theory in the documentary “Caesar’s Messiah”, and I consider it not only very credible, but also a super huge revelation!

Love

● Love is much bigger than just romantic love, the “couple relationship” type of love that is extensively depicted in movies and books. That is just a part, but there’s also the love for friends, family, strangers, animals, plants, art, work, life.

● Jealousy doesn’t make sense. It’s basically a consequence of mistakenly assuming that the couple relationship type of love is all the love there is.

● If there is a meaning of life, it is love. At the end of the story, what really matters is the love we gave, and the love we received.

Myself

● The most important and difficult challenge in my life is learning to manage my emotions. I am aware now that if I want to succeed at achieving my biggest goals, this is a necessary skill to master. I have no other way.

● I won’t make meaningful progress in life by learning a lot of new notions. I will make it, instead, by learning some specific notions, and by cultivating virtues like courage, honesty and discipline.

● Practicing introspection, to discover what’s inside myself, is very difficult and painful. It’s also the most exciting adventure. And it’s sort of weird: I research, I study, I make efforts, all this without even knowing what it is that I am searching for. But I have a strong feeling that I have to continue digging.

● The inputs that I feed myself with (movies, books, music) impact directly the way I think, and the way I feel. As obvious as it seems now, I wasn’t aware about this connection some years ago. These days, I consciously avoid watching horror movies, or reading books about killers and psychopaths, for example. I prefer to feed my mind with happy topics.

● There are so many things that I don’t know. But the more new things I discover, the more grows in me a sense that there are others to discover…

People

● Having original thoughts is extremely rare. Most thoughts that circulate in people’s minds are someone else’s thoughts.

● A lot of people, when they talk, simply regurgitate what they have been taught as kids. They do this over and over, their entire life, without ever applying some critical thinking to decide if those teachings made sense or not.

● Just because someone speaks louder, or has a microphone in his hands, doesn’t mean that he deserves more attention.

● There’s a huge difference between education and wisdom. Many of the people I know are fairly well educated, but very few of them are wise.

● The world is full of corruption, hate, dishonesty, and still in the middle of this mess there are some people with super beautiful souls. They are so precious that they are worth the quest.

● It’s a great skill to be able to talk, and act, without being driven by emotions. And it’s important to recognize when other people, especially those who are close, like family and friends, give advice that is dictated by their fears and insecurities, so to discard it.

● Many people never change. As much as they’re exposed to clear, useful information that they could use to solve their problems, they will ignore that information and keep on struggling with the same problems, over and over, for their entire life. It’s better not to lose time insisting in helping them, but to focus instead on those who are ready to accept solutions.

● The best way to deal with depressed people is to stay away from them. Happiness is a choice, and most depressed people simply choose to be unhappy.

● There are things that the masses do, but no matter how many people do them: they still make absolutely no sense, so there’s no need to join them. Two great examples in this category are:

turning to politics to have the problems of the society fixed.
working at jobs where time is traded for money.

Money

● Money is an exciting topic, and not boring as I used to think. Money is very useful to understand people’s emotions, especially fear.

● Money is ultimately just a mental construct.

● Money favors those who produce and control it (banks and governments) and enslave those who have to use it (citizens).

● Having a regular job is not the only honest way to earn money, passive income systems are another option, and a much smarter one under many points of view.

● Economy and finance are two very different things. Economy is more about people, how they behave in the market to meet their desires. It’s a much more concrete, useful topic to study. Finance instead is about paper money, banks, graphs, titles: these things are part of a circus that adds no value to the life of people.

● Making the transition from employee to entrepreneur requires a huge shift in the mindset. An entrepreneur needs very different skills: for example it’s necessary to understand more the psychology of people.

● Understanding the law of supply and demand is super useful, and not just for an entrepreneur who runs a business, but for everybody, because it applies to many situations in daily life.

● You can’t do the right things, if you’re in the wrong place. For example, even if you work hard, diligently and efficiently, but you’re providing your labor to institutions that produce zero (or negative) value for the society -like banking corporations or cigarette producers- then you’re illuding yourself that you’re “doing a good job”.

● I think I understand money enough, now, to be able to become very wealthy if I want, in a honest way, and without even working too much. However, I haven’t decided yet if this is really what I want. Lots of money would allow me to develop some beautiful projects on a big scale (like building hospitals, schools, educational media), but on the other hand, it would inevitably attract the attention of the government. And I’m not sure I want to spend my time dealing with such a gigantic and predatory structure. I need to reflect more about this.

● One of the craziest things of the modern world is that most people spend an entire life working for money, without even understanding what the working is for. They never take some time to learn how money is produced, by who, how it works.

● Few things will put you in an uncommon position as becoming financially free. While everyone around talks, acts and moves driven by the desire of making money, you’re part of a very tiny minority that focuses on other topics.

Health

● Having a healthy diet requires essentially two things:

developing a knowledge about nutrition (in particular understanding the concept of density of nutrients of foods).
discipline.

● Products based on refined flour (like pasta and bread) are almost as unhealthy as white sugar. It doens’t make sense, as I was doing until some years ago, to avoid sugar as a fundamentalist, but then splurge on pasta and bread everyday.

● If there is one food that I always have to stay alert not to eat, it’s burnt food. The black spots under the pizza, toasted bread, and grilled meat are loaded with a disastrous amount of toxins.

● Most of the honey sold in the stores is as bad as white sugar, because it’s pastorized, heated at high temperature, that’s what makes it as transparent and fluid as syrup. Raw honey is the way to go.

● Dairy products with reduced amounts of fat, or completely fat-free, are actually less healthy than their whole counterparts. The fat in milk, yogurt and cheese is useful to digest fat-soluble vitamins. So it’s better to eat these foods whole.

● Diet impacts the overall health, and also the body figure, more than exercise does.

● Exercise is useful, but too much of it can stress the body and worn it out. I used to go to the gym 3/4 times per week, these days I prefer to go a couple times and pay more attention to the way I eat, instead.

● Despite being super popular, jogging is actually not so healthy. When a person jogs, tissues and organs of the body jump up and down, up and down, up and down, and that’s quite stressing, and pro-aging, for the organism. It’s much healthier in the long run to prefer activities like moderate weight lifting, yoga, gymnastics.

Notes: I expect that these insights will be valid for many years to come, so I wrote this post as a reminder for myself, with some useful indications to follow in the future. It will also be interesting to see if I’ll change my mind about some of them, and if I will feel like adding more.

Brown rice VS white rice

Posted on October 16, 2014 by PaoloDS


Brown rice is the rice as it comes naturally from the plant. The grain is complete, composed of three parts: germ (the point where the grain sprouts), bran (the external envelop), endosperm (the white internal part, that the new plant initially uses as “fuel” to grow).	White rice is the rice resulting from industrial processing. The grain is incomplete, because the germ and the bran are removed. Only the endosperm remains.

Brown rice is alive food. If you put a grain in water, it will sprout.	White rice is dead food. If you put a grain in water, nothing will happen.

Brown rice requires longer time to cook, because the presence of the bran makes the grain harder.	White rice has been created for “convenience” reasons: one of these is that it requires less time to cook, because without the bran the grain is softer.

The presence of the bran has an important effect in brown rice. Since it contains fiber, it slows down the absorption of sugar in the blood stream, which is released more gradually and for longer time. Result: you feel full for longer, and have better control of your appetite.	White rice was created also because it’s more palatable. Without fiber, as soon as you eat it the sugar is immediately released into your blood stream, giving you “pleasure”. But you pay a heavy price for this pleasure: the spike in your blood sugar level will be compensated by a very low level later. Result: you will have low energy, and soon you will be hungry again.

Brown rice is a nutrient dense food. Together with the carbohydrates contained in the endosperm, you also get minerals, vitamins, good fats, fiber, all coming from the other two parts: germ and bran.	White rice is an empty calorie food. Basically, it only gives you the pure carbohydrates contained in the endosperm. So white rice is caloric, but not nutrient.

This simple comparison brown rice vs white rice makes it evident:

brown rice is the healthiest form of rice. It is nutritious and it represents a long term strategy for having more energy.

white rice in an unhealthy food. It is non-nutritious and it represents a short term strategy: it’s a libido in the moment you eat it, but it’s also an insidious energy zapper.

Make your choice!

Notes: updated Nov 11, 2014 with better pictures.

Brown rice with yellow tomatoes

Posted on September 29, 2014 by PaoloDS

This was the main course of my lunch today: brown rice (which provides healthy carbohydrates, since it has the complete nutrient package from the whole grain) with raw yellow tomatoes. As condiment I just added a little extra-virgin olive oil, with little pieces of garlic and fresh peppermint leaves.

many-yellow-tomatoes

yellow-tomatoes

These tomatoes are grown by my dad’s aunt in the countryside. She calls them “bell pepper-tomatoes”, in fact they look like small yellow bell peppers, and they also have a thick skin, but they are actually tomatoes. I think their color is beautiful, like gold! I’ve never seen these anywhere else, I suspect they’re an ancient variety of tomatoes. This makes them very precious at my eyes: I am saving the seeds, I want to try to plant them next year! healty-brown-rice-with-yellow-tomatoes

3 Shifts that improve your life conditions

Posted on September 18, 2014 by PaoloDS

The following are three shifts that I strongly suggest, as they can improve your life conditions. On the left, the “entities” that are more popular today. The best thing you can do is to move your focus away from these, and orientate it towards the entities at the right. Let’s see why.1. Shift your focus from finance to economy. When I was younger I used to say that “economy is terribly boring”. Today I find it very interesting and exciting. The problem is that, when I was younger, I was confusing the two things. What I believed to be the economy was actually finance. Unfortunately, this is still a common belief for a wide spread of the population.

There is an overexposure of finance in the media today, that keep on talking about banks, paper money, indexes and graphics, as if they were meaningful topics. But they are not. All these things are related to a parasitic financial estabilishment that adds no practical value to the life of people. Real economy, instead, is the science that studies the desires of people, and how people behave in the free market to meet these desires.

Free from the intervertion of governments and banks, real economy truly serves the desires of everyone. Once you shift your focus on it, you will not be distracted and conditioned by the finance uselessness anymore, and you will put your desires first.2. Shift your focus from religion to spirituality. The main problem with religions is that they are human institutions. While many of them are founded on spiritual principles, with time they have taken a detour. Consider that most religions are hundreds or thousands of years old. There’s been plenty of time for groups of power to distort the spiritual messages, so to obtain privileges and control over the masses.

Getting rid of religious dogmas is a necessary step to make room for something else. …what else? When people are unsatisfied with religions, their typical first reaction is to embrace materialism. In this stage there is the belief that science has all the answers. I went through it. At this stage you believe that humans, animals and plants are machines without purpose. Evolution is going nowehere. There is usually no familiarity with the concept of consciousness, and if there is some, then it’s reserved only to humans. Animals, plants, object, the planet, the universe, they’re all unconscious.

The step further, once you realize that this vision is limiting as well, is in a direction that I label as “spirituality”, for simplicity. At this stage you start to see less coincindences in the events that happen, and find more purpose instead. You understand that reality is a projection of the mind, and that the mind itself is not strictly closed in your brain, but it’s also outside of you. This is a very complex topic and I will not expand the discussion here, but I want to remark that shifting to a spiritual vision comes with great advantages: it increases the connection with your inner self, it makes you listen more to your intuition, and pushes you to work with determination to achieve your dreams. Because you know they are achievable.

To clarify how religion and spirituality are different, click here.

3. Shift your focus from diet to nutrition. I made an entire video to explain why diets don’t work. Diets are usually stressful and orientated to the short term. They rarely help you mantain an ideal weight for long. In addition, a serious problem is that typically the main focus of diets is not health, but “shape”. Diets are all about quantity (of calories), but they rarely concentrate of the quality (of nutrients).

It’s smart to stop worrying about diets and develop a knowledge about nutrition, instead. It will give you two crucial advantages. First, if you eat mostly nutrient-dense foods, you can basically eat as much as you want without getting fat. Second, this way your body and your mind will get the fuel they really need. This is especially important for the mind: I think that it’s a greatly underestimated fact that the foods we eat impact our mental clarity.

I advice to stop wasting time with diets and pay bigger attention to nutrition. If you don’t know much about it, start to learn. Nutrition is the absolute #1 impact factor on your health.

PAOLO ds

Category Archives: EN Nutrition