Is poor cellular nutrition the true cause of degenerative diseases?
What is the secret to cellular health? Cellular Nutrition: When we think of health and nutrition, few of us imagine the cell. But actually, the cell is the source of the body’s energy supply; it’s what keeps you not only functioning at optimal health, but functioning at all.
In fact, as soon as the cells lose any of their capacity to produce energy for the body, the result is a decline in health and the emergence of degenerative conditions.
Healthy cell life produces what we call “vitality” – a healthy level of energy and resistance to stress.
But how do we make sure our cells are working at full pump on the energy front? Fortunately, it’s not as hard as it sounds, because scientific research shows that
good nutrition is the key.
Cells and energy
To understand how eating a particular diet can affect your cells, and therefore your energy levels, it’s useful to have a rough idea of how the cells actually work: how the cell produces its energy.
That particular task falls to the mitochondria, the "power plants" of the cell. There are hundreds of these in a typical cell, every one containing a unique pattern of DNA, and their job is to facilitate cellular respiration, a process through which they transform oxygen and nutrients into energy and water.
The many finger-like folds in the mitochondrial inner membrane house respiratory chains where this process happens.
The "bad" side of oxygen
So far, so good. Except that unfortunately, oxygen is actually toxic to biological molecules and cells. That means that all processes involving oxygen, including the oxygen used in cellular respiration, leads to the formation of free radicals.
It’s just a consequence of normal metabolism. The bad news is that these free radicals tend to oxidize biological molecules, just as iron oxidizes when it rusts. Eventually, this assault on the cells can damage them, and inactivate the cellular respiration, leading to the death of the cell.
The body’s response to all this is to unleash a grand defense mechanism, using antioxidant molecules (good guys) against the free radicals (bad guys).
It doesn’t always get the response right, however, or it can’t produce enough antioxidants for the task. The result is that free radicals ravage the body’s proteins, fats, and DNA/RNA. The body also removes and repairs some damaged macromolecules, but often the sheer volume of free radicals overwhelms the repair system.
Oxidative stress
In 1956, Professor Denham Harman propounded the famous "free radical theory of ageing." The theory holds that as we age and the oxidative damage the body has sustained over the years takes its toll, the level of
oxidative stress itself rises.
That means that oxidative damage increases over the course of a lifetime and advances especially quickly in old age. At that point, we tend to see a prevalence of degenerative diseases, and the most obvious signs of ageing.
Oxidative stress and chronic degenerative diseases
In fact, scientists and doctors now widely agree that oxidative stress figures prominently in
atherosclerosis and heart disease, cell transformation and
cancer, all kinds of inflammatory conditions, eye problems such as
cataracts and macular degeneration, as well as brain and nervous system conditions such as
Alzheimer's disease.
Neutralizing free radicals and disease prevention
So how can we try to reduce or prevent free radical damage to the cells?
If
oxidative stress increases when antioxidant defenses weaken, or free radical levels rise, it follows that we can decrease oxidative stress by bolstering the body's antioxidant defenses and reducing the amount of free radicals floating around the blood and tissues.
Optimal cellular nutrition
Many experts now agree that this is most easily done by boosting your natural defenses through optimal cellular nutrition.
This simply involves providing ALL nutrients to the cell at optimal levels, which allows it to decide what it actually does and does not need.
In this way, you can make sure there aren’t going to be any nutritional deficiencies – because nutrient levels will automatically be corrected within a few months of regaining optimal cell nutrition. Which nutrients are needed for optimal cellular nutrition?
Basically, getting optimal cellular nutrition means giving your body all the Research often shows that the
antioxidants, in addition to the supporting B vitamins and antioxidant minerals. These also need to be ingested at optimal levels.
recommended daily allowance (RDA) of each nutrient may not be enough to prevent many health conditions.
That’s because the RDA levels were originally determined during the years of last century’s World Wars, and they really only apply to the minimum levels of nutrients needed to ward off certain acute deficiency diseases which are no longer particularly common (e.g. scurvy, rickets, pellagra).
As a result, they don’t account for conditions such as chronic degenerative diseases, which are far more prevalent today.
Optimal levels to prevent degenerative disease
Nowadays, the optimal levels of nutrients known to provide health benefits are significantly greater than those suggested by the
RDA levels. For example, some studies show that the optimal level of
vitamin C is approximately 1200 to 2000 mg daily, while the RDA is only 60 mg.
To benefit from the optimal levels of cellular nutrition, you’d need to eat 17 kiwifruit, or 18 oranges, or 160 apples!
When you look at it like that, it seems obvious that the best way to get these levels of
vitamins, minerals and other nutrients is to take
a good quality supplement. Think of cellular nutrition as a very wise way of using the supplement and your food as “preventative medicine” to stop the disease process before it even begins.
