I have an important new way of thinking about nutrients that I want to tell you about.
If you’re a member of my Confidential Cures newsletter you already know a bit about my Nutrition Pyramid. Today for you in Doctor’s House Call I want to tell you why this is important in the way you think about food, supplements and nutrients.
There are four simple levels. At the base is Primal Nutrition. Just above that is ortho-nutrition. Then you have ultra-nutrition. And at the top is telo-nutrition.
Primal nutrition means getting the basic amounts of protein, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants our paleo ancestors got from their environment. Ortho-nutrition means correcting for the nutrient deficiencies caused by the abuses and toxins we’re suffering from in today’s world.
Ultra-nutrition is where you try to do better than just what nature intended and get performance gains over what’s “normal.” Telo-nutrition is using nutrients to affect the length of the telomere to prevent disease and preserve youth.
One of the reasons I think there’s a need for my Nutrition Pyramid is that other people who tout vitamins and supplements are stuck in ultra-nutrition.
It’s caused them to hype up the benefits of vitamins. And it’s probably why standard medicine is not accepting of the value of nutrients.
I think of nutrients differently. We are living in an abnormal environment, and we haven’t had our evolutionary needs met during the change from paleo to modern times. But that’s a nutritional requirement we can address. And, we can separate that basic need from the hyped up claims of “ultra” performance from a vitamin.
Vitamins and better performance are separate ideas. They’re separate therapies that need different nutrients.
Vitamin C is a good example. Yes, you’ll feel great if you take it. It’s anti-cancer, it’s anti-oxidant, it’s heart healthy. But you need it as the base of your nutrition. It doesn’t need hype. We have to get vitamin C, and there’s a lack of it in modern food which is causing chronic disease.
Fulfilling that need is what the base of the Nutrient Pyramid is all about. I made it a pyramid because that helps remind us of the amounts of these foods we need. The doses of nutrients.
You need a lot of nutrients like vitamin C. But not for ultra performance. You need them to fulfill basic evolutionary needs and to overcome the abuses of today’s environment.
And it doesn’t take anything exotic to do the job.
Take oranges, for example. People seem to be down on them lately. But here’s the thing you might not know about oranges. They are full of nutrients we can’t get much of in the modern world: polyunsaturated fats, choline, and cancer-fighting carotenoids and flavonoids.
Oranges are ortho-nutritional because eating a couple of oranges helps overcome a lack of nutrients like vitamin C, vitamin A, folate, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus.
Oranges also have a primal nutrition component: healthy fats. Today, we hardly have a good natural source of essential, healthy polyunsaturated fats, or PUFAs, which include omega-3s and omega-6s in the right ratio. A medium orange has almost 100 mg of PUFAs. And in they’re in nature’s perfect 1:2 ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s.
The list of benefits from omega-3s is almost too long to list here. They preserve your telomeres, boost your brainpower, strengthen your heart and arteries, and protect against many of the diseases we associate with aging.
Choline is considered part B-vitamin and part essential nutrient. Because you can’t make enough, choline is classified as an essential nutrient so you need to get it through food.
I wrote to you recently about choline’s memory-boosting benefits. It also benefits your telomeres,1 gives you energy, and is the brain chemical responsible for balance, movement, alertness and muscle movement.
Cancer was extremely rare in paleo times. Eating plenty of oranges and their cousins would have contributed to stopping cancer due to flavonoids like rutin. Rutin can kill off leukemia and colorectal cancer cells.
Oranges also have beta-cryptoxanthin, a carotenoid, and hesperidin, a flavonoid. They are also anti-cancer, helping to prevent colon cancer and lung cancer.2
This makes oranges perfect for a primal and an ortho-nutritional boost.
You probably know about Florida navel oranges. But the oranges I like the most are Temple oranges. They are more oval and a deeper orange. Plus they have slightly higher nutrient levels and a very rich sweet flavor compared to navel oranges. And they’re easier to peel.
The other Florida orange I like are Valencias. They ripen a little later than Temples, and are also oval shaped. I like them because they smell like you imagine an orange should smell. They are a bit more yellow-greenish-orange, but don’t let that fool you. They’re maybe the juiciest orange there is, and they have more B-vitamins than other oranges.
To Your Good Health,
Al Sears, MD
1. Imbard A, et. al. “Plasma choline and betaine correlate with serum folate, plasma S-adenosyl-methionine and S-adenosyl-homocysteine in healthy volunteers.” Clin Chem Lab Med. 2013;51(3):683-92.
2. Tanaka T, Tanaka T, Tanaka M, Kuno T. “Cancer chemoprevention by citrus pulp and juices containing high amounts of β-cryptoxanthin and hesperidin.” J Biomed Biotechnol. 2012;2012:516981.