I’ve been telling you about how you can reclaim your optimal health with Primal Nutrition.
But that’s only the first step…
I’ve developed a four-tiered Nutrition Pyramid designed to give your body exactly what it needs to thrive.
And the second level of my pyramid is Ortho.
You see, we were built for a certain environment. But we no longer live in it. We’ve changed the world so fundamentally that we need nutritional supplements to get back to the basic nutrition our ancestors enjoyed.
I call the second level “Ortho nutrition.” It allows you to correct or “straighten out” the problems that come from living in our toxic and undernourished environment.
For instance, take my royal palm trees in my backyard.
When I look up at these soaring trees, I’m reminded how perfectly suited they are for their environment. I can drop a seed in the ground and it grows wonderfully well.
It grows fast and strong because it has no nutritional deficiencies. I don’t have to do a thing to it. I don’t have to fertilize it. I don’t have to water it. I don’t have to augment the soil.
The royal palm evolved here in Florida to perfectly match whatever it finds in the dirt.
After supplementing the soil with magnesium, the Chinese fan palms in my garden went from yellow and diseased to green and lush.
Yet it was a different story with the Chinese fan palms that were here when I bought my house. They were yellow, stunted and diseased.
But all I had to do to make them healthy again was to add some magnesium to the soil. I fertilized them with Epsom salt and they turned green and lush.
Unlike the royal palms that grow perfectly without any supplementation, the Chinese fan palm requires additional nutrients.
Otherwise they’ll wither and die.
And we are the same way…
In the same way I was able to “straighten” out my Chinese fan palm plants by supplementing the soil with magnesium, it’s important that we straighten out our diet as well…
Just to get back to the Primal nutrition of our ancestors.
You see, we no longer eat the food nature provided. Instead, we reply on industrial producers — whose main goal is not nutrition, but profit.
As a result, our food is nutrient poor. Our vegetables have far fewer vitamins and minerals than they did just 50 years ago. In fact, you’d have to eat 40 servings of spinach today to equal the nutrition of just one serving from 100 years ago.1
And the health problems and premature aging we face today are a direct result of a lack of these nutrients.
The B vitamin biotin is a good example. You may have heard how biotin helps your hair and nails stay healthy. But it does so much more than that…
It helps you normalize and stabilize insulin.
The spinach our ancestors ate had all the biotin they needed. So they didn’t get insulin spikes or diabetes.
You see, biotin improves the way your body uses glucose. And it gives you a safe and easy way of managing your blood sugar.2 In one study, 43 diabetic patients took biotin supplements for just one month. They lowered their fasting blood sugar levels by 45%.3
Biotin works by increasing glucokinase, a liver enzyme. That helps convert glucose to glycogen so your body can get it out of the bloodstream and store it safely away. Your insulin levels return to normal.
To give your body back its primal level of biotin, I recommend eating biotin-rich foods. Liver, kidneys, eggs, oysters and spinach are all good sources. But nowhere near enough. It’s almost impossible to get what you need through food alone.
This is where Ortho nutrition comes into play… to fix the specific areas that may be a problem. To make up for what we no longer get from food — and to treat a specific problem like insulin spikes — you need a higher “therapeutic dose.”
I recommend supplementing with at least 3,000 mcg (3 mg) per day. But you probably won’t get nearly enough biotin in a multi-vitamin. Even a B complex will probably only give you 100 mcg.
But be careful which supplement you choose. Biotin is easily destroyed by heat. Most biotin supplements don’t take the precautions needed to keep the vitamin stable.
Replenish Your Missing Nutrients with My Ortho Nutrition Green Drink
To make up for a lack of minerals and nutrients in our produce, I’ve been giving myself an ortho-nutritional boost every day with a hybrid of supplements and food. I make myself a green ortho-smoothie. What I do is blend down vegetables into a very small package so I get an infusion of nutrients without eating a ton of food.
Here’s one of my favorite recipes:
Ingredients:
- 1 cup spinach
- ¼ cup parsley
- ¼ cup radicchio
- ½ cup Swiss chard
- 1 purple carrot
- 1 cucumber
- 1 lime
- ½ cup filtered water
Blend together with a half cup of ice and enjoy.
You don’t have to follow this recipe to the letter. You can make it to your taste. You can replace the spinach with mixed greens or kale. You can trade out a lemon for the lime.
To Your Good Health,
Al Sears, MD, CNS
References
1. Picard A. “Today’s fruits, vegetables lack yesterday’s nutrition.” The Globe and Mail. April 17, 2018.
2. Lazo de la Vega-Monroy M, et. al. “Effects of biotin supplementation in the diet on insulin secretion, islet gene expression, glucose homeostasis and beta-cell proportion.” J Nutr Biochem. 2013;24(1):169-177.
3. Maebashi M, et al. “Therapeutic evaluation of the effect of biotin on hyperglycemia in patients with non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus.” J Clin Biochem Nutr. 1993;14:211-218.