What do instincts have to do with nutrition?

We need two basic types of nutrition, macro nutrients, or calories for fuel, and micro nutrients, vitamins and minerals etc, for ongoing health. The micronutrients are among the thousands of chemicals that repair and maintain our bodies.

We are told that we should get the "recommended daily allowance" of all the known key micronutrients.
Definition of RDA:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/recommended%20daily%20allowance

But the RDA is a bit of a science fiction. We do need calories on a daily basis to keep going, but we do not need micronutrients daily to keep going. Why is that?

The body stores micronutrients - animals in nature only restore supplies of many of them on a seasonal basis. They have adapted to this pattern over the millenia. We humans are no exception! We have not evolved physiologically to any significant degree for 100,000 years, but the industrial revolution began, what, about 200 years ago?

Meanwhile we have developed all kinds of technologically concentrated and refined substances that massively overstimulate our innate inborn instincts governing what food we eat, and how much of it. Which seems kind of stupid, why did we do that? Well, because the taste of these things is amazing, and because we can do it. Also because there's billions of dollars of profits in it.

Betcha can't eat one. Presenting: the lowly potato chip.

Standard diets have become full of these concentrated substances. Modern foods have become irresistible, addictive, and also unfortunately, deadly. Consuming "foods" (using the term loosely) laden with these substances completely wrecks our inborn instinctual ability to "know" what and how much to eat. The foods we are biologically adapted to, the foods that make us whole and well, are no longer even on the table, but if they were we would still not pick them because our instincts for nutrition have been wrecked by concentrated substances.

So what are these "native" foods for humans? If you believe as I do that we are adapted to consume mostly plants, then one common definition promoted by many of the MDs using diet to reverse the too common diseases of diet is SOS free WFPB, which translates to sugar oil and salt free plant based whole foods. This immediately eliminates the instinct wreckers in our diets, and provides us with the nutrient dense calories we need for wellness.

Sugar oil and salt are the three primary problems in modern diets. Let's go back to the potato chip - salt and oil, highly addictive, and toxic. What's for dessert? Sugar and fat, also toxic and highly addictive.

There are so many problems with cooking oils I won't even try to address them all here, but in this context they provide hidden and empty calories. And if that weren't bad enough, for many folks consuming standard diets most of the total calories they consume in an average day come from oils!

Can you imagine? Most of the "food" consumed in a day is oil? And when it's heated it's really not just oil, it's grease. No wonder I had acne as a child.

But to get back on point, the purpose of this particular blog is to tell you that all is not lost, we can return our inborn instincts to normal. Well normal is no longer the completely accurate word since so many of us have have unintentionally wrecked them beginning early childhood.

When we go back to eating whole foods only, as close to their natural state as possible - simple recipes of few ingredients with minimal or no cooking and no added sugar oil or salt - within a relatively short period of time our instincts begin to return. We begin to taste complex and wonderful flavors in simple vegetables we may not have noticed before. And fruit becomes a dance of utter deliciousness.

Instincts begin to return relatively quickly, but we become accustomed to them, and the messages they are giving us, a bit more gradually. For example (and to return to the beginning), what do instincts have to do with nutrition?

When we are running the clean body instincts returned to us by clean foods, and are low in some particular micronutrient, we will find the foods that contain that nutrient especially appealing "for no particular reason", as attraction to the foods that are supremely good for us becomes a "self-healing" problem.

The body does truly vector toward health at every available opportunity, in every possible way.