Adam & Eve:Simple eating
When you think about the instructions given to
Adam and Eve in Gen1:29-30 you begin to
realize that their choices for food where limited
to the seed bearing fruits, nuts, and vegetables
from the ground and milk from the goat
Grains, as they had been instructed, were for the
foul and animals that wandered the earth..
What are we to take from
these instructions?
It seems that the simple foods of
fruits and vegetables were provided
for their sustenance.
Grains are not usable since they had
no way to mill them or prepare them
for eating purposes.
The digestive system of man wasn’t
designed to breakdown grains.
Simple in Many ways
The fruits of the trees and vines
have simple sugars and many
nutrients, sufficient to sustain them
Vegetables also had many nutrients
with all of the vitamins, minerals,
proteins and phyto-nutrients needed
to provide a balance with the sugars
of the fruits
Grains are complex
Carbohydrates
The digestive tract of man was not able
to provide the enzymes needed to
breakdown the proteins and complex
carbohydrates found in grains.
Goats have the ability to turn the grains
into the milk that was useable by man
Cows also have the ability to provide milk
but it isn’t the best choice for man
Simple really is better
It appears when you look at how the
body receives sugars or
Monosaccharides, Disaccharides,
and Polysaccharides, as they are
called, you begin to realize why
simple is better
Fruit and vegetables have, as nature
provides, a balance of the different
sugars
Fruits give single sugars
The Monosaccharides in fruits
provide what the brain and liver
needs
Monosaccharides
Do not require digestion to enter the
body
They are absorbed directly into the
blood that returns to the liver, the
Portal Vein
There the single sugar is stored
Disaccharides &
Polysaccharides
Are treated differently by the body
They pass farther down the digestive
tract, the duodenum, and are
enzymatically broken down, digested,
to their single sugars or glucose,
fructose, or galactose
This sugar form is attached to a sodium
and then able to travel through the wall
of the digestive tract to the lymphatic
or water system of the body
This isn’t bad but it is:
A longer process that ends up with a
sugar/salt combination in the blood
stream
This Sugar mixture in the blood stream
has to be regulated, by insulin, to prevent
the highs and lows that create trouble
Monosaccharides, from fruit, enter the
bloodstream but are used by the liver to
make glycogen
Salt is also a product of:
Sugar, disaccharide and
polysaccharide, digestion and
transport into the blood
The salt that is attached to the
glucose has to be there so the active
transport of the glucose can happen
Salt travels into the body as part of
this active transport of sugar
What to do with the salt
Some salt is good
To much salt is stressful for the body as
many with high blood pressure know all
to well
How does the body deal with extra salt?
The first thing it does is try to dilute it by
retaining water. That's the edema you
experience
The next is to try to eliminate it via the
kidneys
What a mess
Kidneys produce a hormone that is called
anti-diuretic hormone
The body wants to flush out the excess
salty water and the blood sugar as well
If the salt goes, so goes the blood glucose
Sounds simple-Lets just trigger the
kidneys to remove the water and both
sugar and salt drop, right?
Not that simple
The kidneys excrete extra water
The pancreas is working to lower the
blood sugar levels by storing the
sugar as fat on the body
When the sugar levels come down
the water can be released
Not until then
You See the Brain always
wins
The sugar, for the brain, was stored for
future use
The salt may do some damage if it builds
up high enough but the adrenal glands
can produce the hormone cortisol to build
fat to store the salt as well
None of this would have happened if the
person hadn’t eaten processed foods that
the body does not normally deal with
Complex carbohydrates
Force the body to use systems to make
corrections when they enter the body
Single sugars do not cause this corrective
reaction by the body
They just provide nutrients and proper
storage
More in the next
presentation
We’ll be looking at the roll of
proteins in the diet
Once again simple is better
That is also true of the fatty acids
we consume
See you next time