NO REASON FOR DISEASE – Don Chisholm 14th April 8:30pm AEST
Today’s world is so different to the world our parents and grandparents lived in. They didn’t have the problems we’re facing today and to survive we have to make ourselves aware of what is driving the ever increasing illness and disease all around us.
Why is there so much disease, why is it that everyone lives with a condition they would prefer not to have? In fact more than half the population has at least one chronic health condition—this is not right!
What are we doing wrong? What has changed?
Not all disease has to be permanent. NO REASON FOR DISEASE with The Gut Man, Don Chisholm, presents why we have so much disease, what we can do to reduce it and how we even start to prevent it.
CAST: Don Chisholm Type: DOCUMENTARY Dur: 90MIN Year: Filmed in year 2019
Today’s world is so different to the world our parents and grandparents lived in. They didn’t have the problems we’re facing today and to survive we have to make ourselves aware of what is driving the ever increasing illness and disease all around us.
Why is there so much disease, why is it that everyone lives with a condition they would prefer not to have? In fact more than half the population has at least one chronic health condition—this is not right!
What are we doing wrong? What has changed?
Not all disease has to be permanent. NO REASON FOR DISEASE with The Gut Man, Don Chisholm, presents why we have so much disease, what we can do to reduce it and how we even start to prevent it.
Don will also be joining us live via video straight after the screening to answer common questions and help you get started on optimising your health.
Proudly hosted by Nyree of Unity Wellness. Tickets MUST be purchased by 10am on 13th March for the screening to go ahead and are available now from Fan Force. Please check the Facebook Event Page for further info and updates.
Food, while being the condition for the possibility of all life itself, is rarely appreciated for its true power. Far beyond its conventionally defined role as a source of energy and building blocks for the body-machine, new discoveries on the frontiers of science reveal that food is also a powerful source of information.
We are all hardwired to be deeply concerned with food when hungry, an interest which rapidly extinguishes the moment we are satiated. But as an object of everyday interest and scientific inquiry, food often makes for a bland topic. This is all the more apparent when juxtaposed against its traditional status in ancient cultures as sacred; or in contemporary religious traditions like Catholicism where a cracker still represents the body of Christ (Eucharist). But as my previous investigations into the dark side of wheat have revealed, food is one of the most fascinating and existentially important topics there is. And in many ways, until we understand the true nature of food, and how it is still the largely invisible ground for our very consciousness, we will not be able to understand our own nature and destiny.
How We Got Here
Modern Western concepts of food are a byproduct of a centuries old process of intense secularization. Food is now largely conceived in terms of its economic value as a commodity and its nutritional value as a source of physical sustenance. In the latter regard, its value is quantified through the presence and molecular weight of macro- and micronutrients or its “fat-inducing” calories. In the process of reducing food’s value to these strictly quantitative dimensions, it has lost its soul. Food is no longer believed to possess a vital life force, much less a sacred one. But the etymology of sacred, namely, to make holy, and the etymology of holy, which connects to heal, whole, health, implies correctly that food has the ability to “make us whole.”
Food As Nourishment On All Levels
If talk of food as “sacred” and “whole-making” sounds pseudo-scientific, consider how Nature designed our very first experience of nourishment (if we were fortunate enough to not have been given a bottle full of formula): breastmilk taken from the mother’s breast was simultaneously a nutritional, physical, thermic, emotional, genetic, and spiritual form of nourishment. Food, therefore, can and should never truly be reduced to an object of biochemistry.
And so, as we dig deeper, we discover that the topic of food is a highly cerebral one. And this begins with any simple act of eating, albeit in a slightly different way. It’s called the cephalic phase of nutrition, “in your head,” which reflects how you are actually experiencing the food: is it delicious? Are you feeling pleasure? These “subjective” aspects profoundly affect the physiology of digestion and assimilation. My colleague Marc David has dedicated many years to waking people up to this amazing process. Food, therefore, begins in a context that transcends merely physiochemical conditions and concerns. The nocebo and placebo effects, which are powerful forces in the setting of clinical medicine, also apply to the field and experience of nutrition. And therefore, it is hard to ignore how this important layer of nutrition: the first-hand experience, and even our intention and level of gratitude, has been lost in the fixation on the chemistry and reductionism of food science.
But the inquiring mind wants more specific scientific answers to the question: how does food makes us whole? How does its arrangement of atoms possess such extraordinary power to sustain our species? Why can’t we answer the most rudimentary questions that go back to ancient times, such as the still timeless mystery and miracle of how the bread is transmuted into blood and flesh?
Perhaps, it is the information (and intelligence) within food that will help explain some of this mystery. After all, information literally means “to put form into.” This understanding will add much needed depth and nuance to conventional nutritional concepts where food is still conceived as a bunch of essentially dead and uninteresting atoms and molecules.
The Old Story of Food as a Thing
Our concept of food is still generally constrained to the Newtonian view that all things are comprised of atoms, externally related to one another, and built up from there into molecules, cells, etc. The story goes that when we eat things, digestion breaks them down into their constituent parts and our bodies then take these parts and build them back up. This very mechanical, simplistic view, while valid in limited ways, no longer holds true in light of the new biology and science. Along with this view of food as matter, is the correlate perspective, that food can be “burned” for energy and that like a furnace or a car food provides “fuel” measured by calories to drive its engines along. Of course, this is reinforced by nutrition facts labels which make it appear that not much is going on beyond caloric content and the presence or absence of a relatively small set of essential nutrients such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals, defined by their molecular weight.
This reductionistic view of food I will call, in recognition of Charles Eisenstein’s thinking, “the old story of food,” and this narrative focuses on two primary dimensions.
Food As Matter
If we are looking at the “material” aspects of food, we are looking at the physically quantifiable or measurable elements. You could not, for instance, objectively “measure” taste, as it differs qualitatively from person to person (so-called “subjective experience). And so, nutritional science focuses on what is presumably “out there” objectively, namely, quantities like the molecular weight of a given substance, e.g. 50 mg of ascorbic acid, 10 grams of carbohydrate, or 200 mg of magnesium. In reality, these objective quantities are influenced by the type of measuring device we use — and so, there really are no ontologically pure (i.e. “really real”) material aspects out there in and of themselves. But for the purposes of clarity, let us assume these material aspects are real, independent of the measuring device or person measuring. These material aspects, while providing information, are not considered to be “informational” in the sense of giving off distinct messages to the DNA in our body, altering expression. They are considered part of the physical world, and therefore while providing building blocks for our body, including its DNA, they are not understood to alter or control the expression of the DNA in a meaningful way. Food, therefore, is considered “dead,” and not biologically meaningful beyond its brick and mortar functions in building up the body-machine.
The other primary dimension in this old view is…
Food as Energy
Energy is commonly defined as the power derived from the utilization of physical resources, especially to drive machines. In this view, food provides the fuel to power the body-machine. Food energy is conventionally defined in chemical terms. The basic concept is that animals like humans extract energy from their food and molecular oxygen through cellular respiration. That is, the body joins oxygen from the air with molecules of food (aerobic respiration), or without oxygen, through reorganization the molecules (anaerobic respiration). The system used to quantify the energy content of food is based on the “food calorie,” “large calorie,” or kilocalorie, equal to 4.184 kilojoules. 1 food calorie is the amount of heat required at a pressure of one atmosphere to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree Celsius. The traditional way to ascertain the caloric content of a sample of food is using a calorimeter, which literally burns the food sample to a crisp, measuring the amount of heat given off (its caloric content). In order to account for the varying densities of material within a sample, e.g. fiber, fat, water, a more complex algorithm is used today. (alt definition: an amount of food having an energy-producing value of one large calorie)
Again, in this view, food while providing information (caloric content), is not an informational substance in the biological sense (e.g. DNA), but simply a source of energy which can fuel the body-machine.
The New Story: Food as Information
The new view of food as replete with biologically important information, is based on a number of relatively new discoveries in various fields of scientific research.
For instance, the discovery that food contains methyl groups (a carbon atom attached to three hydrogen atoms (CH3)) capable of methylating (silencing) genes, brought into focus the capability of food to profoundly affect disease risk as well phenotypal expression. If folate, B12, or Betaine — 3 common food components — can literally “shut off” gene expression with high specificity, food becomes a powerful informational vector. One which may actually supervene over the DNA within our body by determining which sequences find expression.
This discovery of nutrition’s prime role in epigenetics opened up an entirely new realm of research, including the disciplines of nutrigenomics, which looks at nutrient-gene interactions, and nutritional genomics, which looks at gene-based risks that provide individualization of nutritional recommendations. Suddenly, almost overnight, food became infinitely more interesting to geneticists, biologists, and medical professionals, in that it as an information vector it could affect, and in some cases control the expression of the DNA, biomedicine’s “holy grail.”
Food’s role as a source of methyl group donors capable of epigenetic modulation of DNA expression is a powerful demonstration of its informational properties, but this is not the whole story…
Food also contains classical genetic information vectors, such as non-coding RNAs, which like methyl donors, have the ability to profoundly alter the expression of our DNA. In fact, there are estimated to be ~100,000 different sites in the human genome capable of producing non-coding RNAs, far eclipsing our 20-25,000 protein-coding genes. These RNAs, together, orchestrate the expression of most of the genes in the body. They are, therefore, supervening forces largely responsible for maintaining our genetic and epigenetic integrity.
These RNAs are carried by virus-sized microvessicles called exosomes found in all the food we eat (they are secreted by all plant, animal, and fungal cells), and survive ingestion to significantly alter our gene expression. In 2012, a groundbreaking study titled, “Exogenous plant MIR168a specifically targets mammalian LDLRAP1: evidence of cross-kingdom regulation by microRNA, found that exosomal miRNA’s from rice altered LDL receptors in the livers of Chinese subjects, effectively proving cross-kingdom regulation by microRNA exists, and is occurring on an ongoing basis through the food we eat. Another study, this time in animals, found that exosomes in commonly consumed foods, e.g. grapefruit, orange, affect importnt physiological pathways in the animal’s bodies. Essentially, these food components ‘talk’ to animal cells by regulating gene expression and conferring significant therapeutic effects. The ability of exosomes to mediate the transfer miRNAs across kingdoms redefines our notion of the human species as genetically hermetically sealed off from others within the animal, plant, and fungi kingdoms. In this sense, food borne exosomes are the mechanism through which all living things in the biosphere are intimately interconnected, perhaps even adding a new explanatory layer to how the Gaia hypothesis could be true.
Another important though overlooked mechanism through which food components may carry and transfer energy and information is through so-called prionic conformational states (protein folding patterns). Prions have been primarily looked upon as pathological in configuration and effect. A classical example is the beta sheet formation of brain proteins in Alzheimer’s. These secondary protein conformations act as a template through which certain deleterious folding states are transferred laterally between proteins. But prions are not always pathological. For instance, naturally forming prions are essential for the health of the myelin sheath in the brain, and likely perform many other important though still largely unknown functions. So, when we look at the phenomena neutrally, the fact that the conformational state (folding state) of a protein can hold and transfer laterally information essential to the structure and function of neighboring proteins without needing nucleic acids indicates just how important the morphology of food may be. It is possible, therefore, that food, depending on how it is grown and prepared, will have vastly different protein folding patterns which will carry radically different types of biologically vital information. This is another example where one can not exhaustively assess the value of food strictly through quantitative methods, e.g. measuring how much protein there is by weight, but need also to account for qualitative dimensions, e.g. the vast amounts of information contained within secondary, tertially and quaternary conformational states of these protens.
The “Microbiome of Food” Is Full of Information
Acknowledging the role the microbiome plays in the food we eat further deepens the our understanding of food as information. In fact, the microbiome could be considered food’s most profound informational contribution. When we consider the genetic contribution of all the bacteria, fungi, and viruses, naturally found in food (especially raw and cultured varieties), this represents a vast store of biologically meaningful information. Some of this microbial information can even “jump” laterally from these micro-organisms into our body’s microbiome, conferring to us significant extra-chromosomal “powers,” essentially extending our genetic capabilities by proxy. For instance, a recent study identified a marine bacteria enzyme in the guts of Japanese, presumably a byproduct of having consumed seaweed naturally colonized by it. This marine bacteria enzyme is capable of digesting sulfated polysaccharides — a type of carbohydrate humans are not equippped to digest because it is marine specific. This indicates that the genes provided by these microbes represent a genetic library of sorts, whose contributions may vastly extend the genetic capabilities of our species. Indeed, the human genome only contains genetic templates for 17 enzymes, whereas the gut bacteria contains genetic information capable of producing hundreds of different enzymes. And these are capable of degrading thousands of different carbohydrates! There are actually many other capabilities provided by these “germs,” including the ability to produce vitamins (including vitamin C!) and other essential biocompounds. The microbiome of our food could therefore be considered an information storehouse. To learn more about how this ancient information (even millions of years old) is preserved in raw foods like honey, read my article: Could Eating Honey Be A Form of Microbial Time Travel?
Water As An Information Carrier In Food
Another extremely important element is the role of water in food. Not only has water been found to carry energy and information, but water has also been identified an instrument of biosemiosis. The water component of food, therefore, could contribute biologically important information — even genetic and epigenetically meaningfully information — without needing nucleic acids to do so.
To learn more about how water has “memory,” and can store and transmit genetic information, read about the DNA teleportation experiment performed by Nobel laurette Luic Montagnier.
As discussed above, conventional food science starts on a completely dehydrated basis, focusing almost exclusively on the ‘dry’ measurable material aspects of the food, or the amount of energy it contains (which ironically requires burning off the water to obtain measurements). All readily edible food is hydrated. Were it not, it would be “dehydrated food,” which is generally not considered ready to eat. As such, we can not talk about biomolecules without considering their hydration shells as integrally and inseparably bound to the “dry” components, e.g. amino acids, fatty acids, sugars. Water has the capacity to carry information and to determine the structuration and therefore functions of the biochemicals and biopolymers it surrounds. Water, which is capable of taking in free energy from the environment (Pollack’s infrared heat), has its own information and energy. This means, therefore, that food qua water content, has the potential to carry relatively vast amounts of information beyond what is found in its material composition itself.
As science progresses, both the quantitative and qualitative elements of water will increasingly be revealed to be vitally important in understanding food as information.
Powerful Implications for the Future of Food and Medicine
When food is looked upon as a vital source of biologically important information which can inform the expression of our genome, it is much easier to understand how our ancestors considered its creation, production, harvesting, cooking, and consumption sacred.
Today, with a wide range of industrial farming technologies changing the quality (and informational component) of our food, it is no longer sufficient to look at only the material aspects of these changes. Irradiation, genetic modification, pesticides, soil quality, processing and a wide range of other factors (intention), may greatly alter the informational state and quality of a good without being reflected in overt changes in grosser qualities like caloric and materially defined dimensions.
No longer can we look at the difference, say, between infant formula and breast milk strictly through the material/energetic lens of conventional nutritional analysis. On an informational level, they are qualitati`vely light years apart, even if they have so many similarities in crude nutritional metrics, e.g. similar carbohydrate and caloric content.
This will be true for all areas of food production, and nutrition, where formerly an essentially dead ontology governed the way we understand and interacted with the things we eat. Once we understand the true implications of food as information, our entire worldview will change. Learn more by reading Sayer Ji and co-writer Ali Le Vere’s chapter in this recently published clinician’s primer textbook: Revisioning Cellular Bioenergetics: Food As Information and The Light-Driven Body.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of GreenMedInfo or its staff.
MEDICAL DISCLAIMER
Unity Wellness provides health-related information to assist people in making their own choices. While we have exercised due care to ensure the accuracy of the information on this site, it is not intended to be used as medical advice and it is not intended to be used to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease, nor should it be used for therapeutic purposes or as a substitute for your own health professional’s advice. Unity Wellness does not accept any liability for any injury, loss or damage incurred by use of or reliance on the information provided on this website.
AFFILIATE & ADVOCATE LINKS
This post/site may contain Affiliate links or links to my Independent Advocate store. By clicking these links, you pay no more for the products/services, but I will receive a commission on purchases to keep this site running & support my family (thank you!). I will never promote any products or services that I would not be happy to use myself.
This website is owned and operated by an independent InnerOrigin Advocate and is not endorsed by InnerOrigin Pty Ltd or InnerOrigin Australia Pty Ltd or any of their respective associated companies. Any opinions expressed on this website are made by, and are the responsibility of, the individual Advocate and should not be construed as a representation of the opinions of InnerOrigin Pty Ltd, InnerOrigin Australia Pty Ltd or any of their associated companies.
Make sure to arrive early because the film will start at 6pm sharp!
In The Gut Movie, we follow the journey of journalist & researcher Kale Brock as, in the quest to discover whether the ‘optimal microbiome’ does indeed exist, he travels from Australia to Namibia to live with The San, an ancient hunter-gatherer people living traditionally from the land. During the excursion Brock monitors his own microbiome and how it changes in conjunction with the new surroundings, and takes microbiome samples of The San to gauge the significant differences in microbiota present across cultures.
There’s no denying that breast milk is the gold standard for human nutrition. In pre-term babies particularly, breast milk has been associated with improved growth and cognitive development, as well as a reduced risk of serious bowel infections and sepsis.
In cases where the mother is unable to breastfeed, what is the next best option to ensure a healthy gut microbiome in the child that will have far-reaching effects on their overall health?
In the last few years, I’ve noticed an increasing number of expectant first-time Mums asking for baby formula recommendations so they can stock up “just in case”. Whilst I completely understand the drive to prepare for all eventualities when you’re having your first baby, it saddens me to think that women don’t realise there’s an intermediate option – donor human breast milk.
A study just published in the Frontiers of Microbiology journal compared the gut microbiota of 69 preterm infants in NICU fed either their mother’s own milk (MOM), pasteurised donor human milk (DHM) or formula, to understand the differences in resulting gut microbiota and the potential biological implications.
Faecal samples were collected and the microbiota composition was analysed through rRNA sequencing. After controlling for other factors, the diversity of gut microbiota increased over time and was constantly higher in infants fed MOM relative to infants with other feeding types. The microbial profile of formula-fed infants was distinct from those observed in MOM and DHM, suggesting that DHM favors an intestinal microbiome more similar to MOM despite the differences between MOM and DHM. DHM has a slightly different composition to MOM relative to the age of the child as women donating milk tend to be feeding older babies and differences in nutritional intake amongst donors can vary, which is offset somewhat by milk pooling – combining milk from several donors. Pasteurization of DHM also causes changes to the microbial balance, enzymes & proteins in the milk. In general though, only minor differences were observed in the functional profiles between MOM and DHM, suggesting the potential effect of DHM in mimicking the microbiome functionality of own maternal milk feeding.
In conclusion, DHM favors an intestinal microbiome more similar to MOM than Formula despite the differences between MOM and DHM. This may have potential beneficial long-term effects on intestinal functionality, immune system, and metabolic activities.
This would be of particular importance to infants born by Caesarian section who would not receive the same exposure to the mother’s vaginal microbiome as those born naturally. In some cases, seeding takes place, where a gauze that’s been placed in the mother’s vagina is wiped over the baby & around their mouth to simulate the transfer of bacteria that occurs in vaginal birth to prime the infant’s immune system.
More research needs to be done to understand the long-term implications of feeding type, but that raises ethical issues around feeding one group an option known to be inferior.
Some people find it difficult to access sufficient donor milk as not all locations have milk banks and preference is given to babies most at risk. It is worth exploring community donor schemes such as Eats on Feets or Human Milk 4 Human Babies. These groups connect donors & recipients, but do not handle the milk or involve themselves in the arrangements. The milk is unlikely to be pasteurised, although that means less damaged by heat, but it is up to you to screen the donors to ensure you feel safe with the milk they provide.
Mother’s own milk will always be the optimal choice, with the interaction between the microbiomes of the mother-child dyad informing the mother’s body of what the baby needs at any given moment to adapt to the environment they live in. It is so important for the mother to have support around her that allows the time, space, hydration & nutrition she needs for proper lactation. If there are issues feeding, seek the advice of a midwife or lactation consultant & have the baby checked for tongue &/or lip ties.
The next-best option is human donor milk, then milk from other species as a last resort. I want to clarify that I am not saying that to judge or berate anyone for the way they feed their baby, but with human health declining & chronic illness rising, I think it is important to give consideration to the evidence available to maximize the health of our children and reverse the disease trends. After all, the contents of our bowels that could get us out of this crap!
Unity Wellness provides health-related information to assist people in making their own choices. While we have exercised due care to ensure the accuracy of the information on this site, it is not intended to be used as medical advice and it is not intended to be used to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease, nor should it be used for therapeutic purposes or as a substitute for your own health professional’s advice. Unity Wellness does not accept any liability for any injury, loss or damage incurred by use of or reliance on the information provided on this website.
AFFILIATE LINKS
This post/site may contain Affliate links or links to my Independent Advocate store. By clicking these links, you pay no more for the products/services, but I will receive a commission on purchases to keep this site running & support my family (thank you!). I will never promote any products or services that I would not be happy to use myself.
This website is owned and operated by an independent InnerOrigin Advocate and is not endorsed by InnerOrigin Pty Ltd or InnerOrigin Australia Pty Ltd or any of their respective associated companies. Any opinions expressed on this website are made by, and are the responsibility of, the individual Advocate and should not be construed as a representation of the opinions of InnerOrigin Pty Ltd, InnerOrigin Australia Pty Ltd or any of their associated companies.
About Me
Nyree Yali
Hi, I'm a former Naturopath-turned-unschooling-parent to a toddler & a tween living in the beautiful South of Tasmania. I'm now helping others on their own journey to wellness & abundance through connecting with their community. I look forward to getting to know you better!Read more...
And so, as we dig deeper, we discover that the topic of food is a highly cerebral one. And this begins with any simple act of eating, albeit in a slightly different way. It’s called the cephalic phase of nutrition, “in your head,” which reflects how you are actually experiencing the food: is it delicious? Are you feeling pleasure? These “subjective” aspects profoundly affect the physiology of digestion and assimilation. My colleague 
If we are looking at the “material” aspects of food, we are looking at the physically quantifiable or measurable elements. You could not, for instance, objectively “measure” taste, as it differs qualitatively from person to person (so-called “subjective experience). And so, nutritional science focuses on what is presumably “out there” objectively, namely, quantities like the molecular weight of a given substance, e.g. 50 mg of ascorbic acid, 10 grams of carbohydrate, or 200 mg of magnesium. In reality, these objective quantities are influenced by the type of measuring device we use — and so, there really are no ontologically pure (i.e. “really real”) material aspects out there in and of themselves. But for the purposes of clarity, let us assume these material aspects are real, independent of the measuring device or person measuring. These material aspects, while providing information, are not considered to be “informational” in the sense of giving off distinct messages to the DNA in our body, altering expression. They are considered part of the physical world, and therefore while providing building blocks for our body, including its DNA, they are not understood to alter or control the expression of the DNA in a meaningful way. Food, therefore, is considered “dead,” and not biologically meaningful beyond its brick and mortar functions in building up the body-machine.
Energy is commonly defined as the power derived from the utilization of physical resources, especially to drive machines. In this view, food provides the fuel to power the body-machine. Food energy is conventionally defined in chemical terms. The basic concept is that animals like humans extract energy from their food and molecular oxygen through cellular respiration. That is, the body joins oxygen from the air with molecules of food (aerobic respiration), or without oxygen, through reorganization the molecules (anaerobic respiration). The system used to quantify the energy content of food is based on the “food calorie,” “large calorie,” or kilocalorie, equal to 4.184 kilojoules. 1 food calorie is the amount of heat required at a pressure of one atmosphere to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree Celsius. The traditional way to ascertain the caloric content of a sample of food is using a calorimeter, which literally burns the food sample to a crisp, measuring the amount of heat given off (its caloric content). In order to account for the varying densities of material within a sample, e.g. fiber, fat, water, a more complex algorithm is used today. (alt definition: an amount of food having an energy-producing value of one large calorie)
This discovery of nutrition’s prime role in epigenetics opened up an entirely new realm of research, including the disciplines of nutrigenomics, which looks at nutrient-gene interactions, and nutritional genomics, which looks at gene-based risks that provide individualization of nutritional recommendations. Suddenly, almost overnight, food became infinitely more interesting to geneticists, biologists, and medical professionals, in that it as an information vector it could affect, and in some cases control the expression of the DNA, biomedicine’s “holy grail.”
These RNAs are carried by virus-sized microvessicles called exosomes found in all the food we eat (they are secreted by all plant, animal, and fungal cells), and survive ingestion to significantly alter our gene expression. In 2012, a groundbreaking study titled, “
Acknowledging the role the microbiome plays in the food we eat further deepens the our understanding of food as information. In fact, the microbiome could be considered food’s most profound informational contribution. When we consider the genetic contribution of all the bacteria, fungi, and viruses, naturally found in food (especially raw and cultured varieties), this represents a vast store of biologically meaningful information. Some of this microbial information can even “jump” laterally from these micro-organisms into our body’s microbiome, conferring to us significant extra-chromosomal “powers,” essentially extending our genetic capabilities by proxy. For instance, a recent study identified 
As discussed above, conventional food science starts on a completely dehydrated basis, focusing almost exclusively on the ‘dry’ measurable material aspects of the food, or the amount of energy it contains (which ironically requires burning off the water to obtain measurements). All readily edible food is hydrated. Were it not, it would be “dehydrated food,” which is generally not considered ready to eat. As such, we can not talk about biomolecules without considering their hydration shells as integrally and inseparably bound to the “dry” components, e.g. amino acids, fatty acids, sugars. Water has the capacity to carry information and to determine the structuration and therefore functions of the biochemicals and biopolymers it surrounds. Water, which is capable of taking in free energy from the environment (Pollack’s infrared heat), has its own information and energy. This means, therefore, that food qua water content, has the potential to carry relatively vast amounts of information beyond what is found in its material composition itself.
When food is looked upon as a vital source of biologically important information which can inform the expression of our genome, it is much easier to understand how our ancestors considered its creation, production, harvesting, cooking, and consumption sacred.
