6 Nutrient Template

Previous posts in this blog have noted that there is only incomplete information about the utility of various nutrients in the body.  Specifically, while many functions are known, there are many that are not, especially for the rarer nutrients.  Also, it is not known how the requirements for nutrients vary with the condition of the flora in our intestine, with our age and condition, with our activity level and type, for the repair of damage and the support of growth, in infected or otherwise diseased states, and so on.  In short, instead of a well-researched model of how food components are used in the body, we have some sketchy information, despite the huge budget of the FDA and sister agencies around the world and the importance of the food industry to the world economy. 

So, it would only be fair to come up with a template that we might ask to have researched and completed.  Once that is done, we can use the information in the database to plan excellent meals in different situations.  Without it, we are stuck with guesses and pushed in the direction of using our taste sensor suite as a guide, which it is not.  So, to give the customer of our food preparation what he or she needs, here is the information we want.

For each nutrient, broken down as fine as necessary to provide comprehensive answers, we want to have this list of data:

1. Where in the body is it used and what does it do there?  Where does not mean, ‘in the liver’ or ‘in the marrow’, and what does not mean ‘growth’ or ‘energy’.  Where means in what cells of the liver, marrow or wherever, and what means what cellular components are built from it, repaired using it, powered from it, replicated from it, or whatever.  By going down to the cellular level, we reach the end of the line in asking about functionality.  
2. How does it travel from the intestinal wall to the interior of the cell, and what changes happen to it along the way?  Does it simply dissolve in the blood stream and wind up in a capillary near the target cell, and then ooze between cells until it gets to the final destination, and how does it work the cellular wall interfaces to get in?  Does it get methylated, oxidized, combined with something else, split into pieces or shortened, or wha
3. Where are there reservoirs in the human body for the nutrient?  If there are any, other than the implicit one of the transport channel, where are they, down to the cellular level if stored in cells, or if in some liquid like the secretions of a gland, exactly where, and also, how much can be stored?  Is the capacity a function of condition, age, status or other variables?
4. What is the interaction of the nutrient with the intestinal flora, assuming they do interact, and which ones interact with it, and what do they do?  If there is only one microbe that reacts with it, which is it, and is the microbe’s interactions necessary for the transport or adaptation of the nutrient to its final form in which it is used?
5. What is the attrition rate in passing through the parts of the human digestive system, e.g., what does stomach acid do to it?  Is there some change caused before it reaches the intestine and the flora there?
6. What is the usage rate and how is it determined?  Not how was the measurement done, but actually how is it consumed and what factors change that usage rate, like exercise, infection, aging, status changes like puberty, or whatever? 
7. What happens if too much is ingested, and how is ‘too much’ determined?  What cells or other things in the body are damaged, if any, or is excretion the only result?  Is an increase in demand for some other nutrient created by a surplus of the nutrient in question?  What are the visible signs of over-ingestion, and what tests can determine it?  The answer to this would depend, for those nutrients that have reservoirs, what is the capacity of the reservoir.  Obviously, if it is empty, ‘too much’ doesn’t start until it is filled.
8. What happens if too little is ingested, and how is ‘too little’ determined?  Do cells die, cease some classes of activity, slow down some reactions, expend resources modifying themselves to withstand the shortage, create chemical signals that indicate shortage, or what?  Similar comments on the play of a nutrient reservoir apply here
9. What is the domain of the nutrient, in other words, what are the various forms of the nutrient and are they interchangeable?  Do the different forms react differently in any of the cells that they are targeted to and the same in the rest?  Do the different forms produce the same function, but require different amounts to accomplish the same bodily function to the same degree? 

To summarize, we want to know what it does in the body, in any amount, and how it moves through the body.  Liquids as well as solids are considered nutrients.   It is not really germane to ask about what passes through the lungs, except to note that the oxygen absorbed there is used in some of the chemical reactions of the body, and lung damage, reducing the available oxygen, might change nutritional requirements.

The form of the data should be statistical, and any correlations with observables or measurable noted.  For example, if the reservoir of a particular nutrient has a strong correlation with weight, or bone mass, or something else, that should be included in the data set.  The residual variation between individuals which remains unexplained should be given by a standard deviation, unless the requirements have a non-Gaussian shape.  In this case, some distributional information would be useful.

5 Reacting to Fake Tastes

After having spent an inordinate amount of time concerned with food, it is hard to accept that good tasting food is nothing but an attempt to fake out the natural senses.  I cannot count the times I have searched for restaurants offering unique dishes, the number of supermarkets, groceries, bodega, and the like I have gone through looking for something interesting, the recipes I have read through, the books on food I have bought and read, the blogs on food adventures I’ve monitored, and so on.  This is all because I was fooled by the makers, purveyors, writers and so on into thinking something real was happening? 

All the people I’ve known who were concerned with food were well-intentioned, decent, honest folks and I cannot believe they would have anything to do with faking people out.  And good cooking has been talked about for three or four millennium at least, so it’s not a function of current society’s goals or directions.  Something very basic is here.  People have sensors in their heads that give them good feelings when they are triggered, and the feedback of people eating something delicious is very obvious to the people involved in preparing and serving it.  Pleasing people may be part of our inner nature, our deep programming, our brainstem’s wiring, and the happiness that ‘good’ food creates probably hits this trigger very strongly as well.  So, ‘fake tastes’, as I called it before, is part of a social behavioral process that is more general than any individual setting. 

As noted before, the process is made possible by the difference in time scales.  There is a short-term one.  You liking food takes a second or two and the wellness feeling that comes from satiety comes in tens of minutes.  There is a long-term one.  Your health deteriorates over days, weeks, months or years if the food is only good tasting, and not sufficiently nutritious.  Growth is affected similarly to health.  Poorly fed people don’t grow as tall as well fed people; this was clearly documented, among other sources, by the post-war increase in height among Japanese.  So, good cooks or clever food industrialists can get inside the second time scale to manipulate the first.  The human body does not have a mechanism to connect poor health or restricted growth with nutritional deficits except for gross malnutrition.  So there is no safety mechanism to protect us against fake tastes.

Now the engineering problem is clearer.  The customer has no way of rapidly judging the real quality of food, measured by how well it supports his health, growth, longevity, capability, and so on, but he does have a clear way of rapidly judging the tastes that are involved, and his judgment is very much affected by the psychological effects they have.  Should we engineer food to be more nutritious or to taste better?  Some, probably small, fraction of the population is immune to good tastes to a large degree, and is unaffected by them, especially in subtle ways, and they can make conscious intelligent decisions to consume nutritious food that covers the requirements spectrum.  The remaining, probably huge, majority, wants good tasting food that they would hope would be nutritious.  Watching people in a supermarket clarifies the division of consumers.  Cart after shopping cart full of less nutritious food, maybe easy to prepare or preparation-free, will parade by before you see one with a concentration on health, at least in the lower level of supermarkets.  Premium supermarkets have a larger fraction of nutrition shoppers.

Children are a special subset of food consumers.  Taste preferences develop with age.  The ones which operate at birth relate, most likely, to mother’s milk tastes, and others may or may not be present that early.  However, one of the simple tastes, sweetness, seems to come on strongly very early.  There is a question, perhaps not yet known to food scientists, as to what portion of food preferences are learned, leaving the rest to be genetic.  Genetic ones can appear at later ages, and learning is obviously something that happens as time progresses, so there is no obvious way to tell the difference by observing how children develop a diversity of taste preferences. 

Cooking, by an engineer or not, for children, needs goals also, but the goals should be those of the parents.  They decide what to serve their children.  These goals then motivate the engineer to do his best to satisfy them efficiently, cost-effectively, and sufficiently.   What should the engineer’s expectations be, allowing him to plan for the most general case of feeding children?  Most of us have observed parents who know no other mode of operating than being a servant to their children, treating them as royalty, and trying to please them.  Other parents are indifferent to the desires of their children, and cook what they like, with extra portions for the children.  Somewhere in the middle, or off to one side of this spectrum, are those who recognize their children need to learn about foods, and plan menus that have usual foods plus something new, which is mandatory for the children to taste or even consume completely.  Engineering is supposed to be a moral profession, committed to the common good, safety, and other positive social attributes.  Should an engineer use his skills to help parents with ‘royal children’, in other words, parents whose psychology is so negative that their self-image will not permit them to put any pressure on the child, or parents who gain all their positive feelings from pleasing other people, not bothering to think if that is the right thing for a child? 

This is obviously related to the question as to whether an engineer professing to be moral will help people eat, more efficiently, cost-effectively or whatever, food which undermines their health or sabotages their immune system, leaving them vulnerable to infection, or which will restrict their growth to below that of a well-fed individual, or any other less than optimal solution?  Who’s in charge: the engineer or other professional, or the consumer? 

Alas, I hoped in this blog to quickly use my engineering experience to say something intelligent and useful about cooking and food in general, but instead, the very first step of figuring out goals for the activity turned into a swamp of conflicting ideas.  Not having realized that good taste is largely a euphemism for tricking the complicated set of food sensors in the head into classifying the food as healthy in the extreme, it seemed that some use of databases about foods could be done to make things efficient, or some scheduling algorithms might speed up food preparation, or something else bright might come out.  Instead, I need to ponder why people have sought to have fake tastes for a long time, and how modern industrial techniques are making that easier and easier, while more and more dangerous, or at least worrying. 

To digress a bit toward thinking about a more general view of the problem, we can think about the human being as an organism that is largely controlled by his brain, which responds to sensors in the body, and which communicates via electrical networks in the brain and by neurochemicals, produced by various glands and other organs, which affect the brain.  You could say that a person’s goals are to produce the right pleasure chemicals in his brain, and there are many ways to do this.  The goal that underlies the decision-making process in a human is not something connected with his own welfare, but with the chemical constituents of some portions of his brain.  When technology, either primitive from millennia past or current, figures out how to affect these chemicals, it allows the technology-user to bypass the welfare of the client or customer, and simply go directly to the more powerful method of affecting the chemicals.  This happens in food preparation.  It also seems to happen in multiple other scenes.  Examples include relationships of all kinds.  If one person can say or do something that changes the chemicals of the other person’s brain to be more of the pleasure-related ones, they then have power over that second person.  If the second person is principally reacting to statements, and responds by taking actions, the leverage that the first person has over the second is very high.  Without any kind of contract, the second has become the servant or vassal of the first.  Someone who learns the art of creating pleasure reactions in others with nothing more than speech or communication gains a great amount of power if the others do not understand what is going on.  Is this what advertising is?

What does this all mean?  Maybe I can figure out something for another blog.

4 Nutrition is a Puzzle

5/20/13

Despite the tremendous amount of writing about nutrition, it doesn’t seem to be understood very deeply.  Let me first talk about ways of understanding something like nutrition.  They are the same three ways we can understand anything complicated, and correspond to three of the many lobes of the brain or three of man’s mental capabilities.  

One way is verbal.  You can read a description of nutrition, maybe some sort of a list of do’s and don’ts for staying healthy, or avoiding obesity, or keeping your immune system going.  If you remember them, and understand the terms used and the grammar involved, you can say you have a verbal understanding of some aspect of nutrition.

Another way is numerical.  You can read about the number of calories needed to keep you healthy, or the amount of fat that is on a dish you are about to eat.  You can add up the saturated fat you consumed in a day or a month, and compare it with recommended guidelines.  You can make a record of your daily weight and figure out the trends in your weight, perhaps how much you are losing each week on an average.  If you do this, you can say you have a numerical understanding of some aspects of nutrition.

The third way is structural, which relates to processes, organizations, categories, and procedures.  You can’t say you have a structural understanding of nutrition because no one does.  Shockingly, scientists have not yet figured out the details of how nutrition works in the human body.

Why on earth hasn’t research in this area been heavily funded for the last fifty years, so now we know exactly what goes on with food in the body?  Since so much health is related to nutrition, what is stopping scientists from simply marching through the nutrition process and nailing down all the unknowns.  Certainly it would be a lot easier to control one’s weight if we understood just what happens when we put some combination of ingredients into our mouths. 

The bottom line is that few seem to care about this.  In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has the responsibility for ensuring the safety of foods that Americans eat.  Food has a wide range of risks involved, so maybe the FDA can excuse itself from not having sponsored enough nutrition research by saying they have lots of other things to worry about, like salmonella in tuna fish or whatever.  The National Health Service (NHS) is run by people who know nutrition is an important factor in health, so they should be dumping big bucks into nutrition research, except they are not.  There are thousands of things that affect health, so maybe they have an excuse as well.  The National Science Foundation (NSF) has all the billions of scientific questions on their plate, so they can’t put too much of their money into nutrition.  And the same goes for all the supporters of research in the US.  If there isn’t funding, there isn’t research, and there isn’t a knowledge explosion.  Too bad for all the people who eat food. 

 

There is no doubt that understanding nutrition will take a lot of work.  Consider what has to be done.  First of all, we are still in the caveman era of feeding ourselves.  Five or ten thousand years ago, some people figured out putting seeds in the ground would grow crops, everything from fruit trees to wheat, and we have been doing this ever since.  This is amazing, considering the revolution in everything else in our lives.  We don’t travel the way we did in caveman days, we don’t live in caves, we don’t die young typically, we have ways to kill infections instead of enduring them, and ways to deaden pain safely, we don’t believe the sun travels around the earth as cavemen did, we don’t fear spirits in trees and rocks, but we still plant seeds and eat the result.  Hopefully somebody will soon figure out how to replace it, but for now, we are stuck with it as a source of all our edible ingredients.

Plants and animals are complex biologically, which means that the basic ingredients of our food are not describable by a simple chemical formula, but instead are a very complex amalgam of multiple chemicals, most of them complex hydrocarbons, including various trace minerals.  It is not a simple puree of these chemicals, but there are cellular structures still present in many foods.  The nutrition process has to deal with these cells, which may be a barrier to absorbing something from inside the cell after it is eaten.  Besides the cellular structure, much food consists of pieces of intact plant or animal, i.e., multiple cells bound together, which again is a challenge to the nutrition process. 

 

This may have been the easy part.  After all, we can take some food element, like a piece of salmon, subject it to whatever food preparation process we are studying or including, and then examine it using all the forensic tools present in a modern biochemical laboratory.  After a huge amount of effort, we might come up with a description of what that piece of prepared food was structurally and chemically.  This might be a count of cells of various types present and how they were connected and bound chemically to each other.  Then we could describe each of the cell types in terms of contents and internal structure.  It would a breakthrough of sorts, as we haven’t done this for complex plant and animal cells, even human ones.  The complexity is too forbidding. 

 

The next part is harder.  In the mouth, as we have described before, there are both physical changes from chewing and other mouth physical actions, and chemical ones where the saliva begins to affect the ingredients.  To find out the effect of the mouth on foods, one would have to collect chewed food in the throat and compare it to the starting attributes of the food.  This might have to be done on all of the various types of foods.

Next is the effect of the stomach on foods. Now the collection problem is much harder.  Perhaps some animals with identical stomachs to humans could be used.  The intestine is next.  Most people have heard that there are more microbial cells in the intestine than make up the body – of course they are one ten-thousandth the size so the volume is small compared to the volume of a human.  However, there are many varieties of them, and the distribution of them over the different varieties varies between people and within one person with time, especially if food choice changes.    This bacterial mix is not identical everywhere in the intestine, either.

These bacteria play an important role in nutrition, as they consume some of the biochemicals in the food that reaches them, and excrete some other biochemicals.  After they have had a chance to consume what they prefer, the lining of the intestine absorbs some of the chemicals into the blood stream.  From there they are transported to various organs and parts of the body.  How much of what gets transported where is another question for the nutritional researchers.  The various absorbed biochemicals have to diffuse through the capillary walls in order to get into various organs, and then the organs’ own chemical processing factories, their cells, do their work to produce what is needed, and perhaps what is not.

 

Things are easier to study when they are linear, meaning, one effect is proportional to some input.  Linearity would mean that if you ate twice as much vitamin C in a second trial compared to the first one, whatever cells took up vitamin C during your initial trial would get twice as much on the second.  Saturation exists, despite many writers ignoring it.  Some intestinal bacteria which, despite your wishes to the contrary, eats up your vitamin C before it gets to your bloodstream might not be able to deal with twice as much, so in your first trial, the bacteria gets fed vitamin C and in the second trial, both you and your bacteria get their fill.  This is very non-linear.  The opposite effect can happen.  For example, cell walls can change their permeability.  If some cell of your body takes in vitamin C through a pore, just designed for it, that pore might close when the cell gets some amount of the vitamin.  So, in the first trial, you get all you need, and the second trial, the additional amount circulates around in the blood because no cells allow it in, and then is excreted as waste.  Now, which of these two events, or many others we could hypothesize, occur in the body?  Another gap for nutrition researchers to fill.

The question of where does saturation occur is a valid one for all biochemicals we ingest, and saturation is only one of many non-linearities we can imagine.  Some of them involve our bacterial companions, others just our own cells.  So, if someone asks you, how much vitamin C do I need, you need to say you don’t know.  One of the more interesting non-linearities concerns inventories.  There may be places where biochemicals are stored but not used, and the cells involve take their signature biochemical out of the bloodstream or put it back in, depending on the level in the bloodstream, or the presence or absence or amount of a completely different one, perhaps one which is produced as waste of the biochemical being stored. 

 

With this level of complexity, scientists hack off small parts of the problem to study, and there are many results from good scientific exploration.  But there is no comprehensive overview that includes the whole process and gives us a structural view, to the level of detail needed to make nutritional computations, of the entire thing.  So, we are left with some simple approximations or estimates or guesses or hypotheses as to what is going on to what amount.  This leaves the door open to all those who want to write about a new diet they have invented.  And it leaves us in a quandary, as bad as the one concerning taste and other attributes.  We need to ask, what would a good engineering team do in this situation…

3 Figuring Out Food Attribute Goals

5/16/13

Perhaps it’s obvious to everybody else, but it’s not obvious to me what the basic goals are for a food preparer relative to the attributes (the five categories listed previously) of the food detected in our heads, to say nothing of nutrition and harmlessness.  Some foods we eat raw, like fruit, some vegetables, sometimes meat or fish, milk.  There are people who eat only raw vegan foods; one of my best friends from long ago was one, and he would amaze me consuming raw potatoes and other raw vegetables which everyone else cooked.  He was incredibly healthy, so I would assume the diet didn’t harm him. 

This raises not only the question of what should a food preparer strive for in taste, but a more general question:  Why cook?  Even in salads, which are usually solely raw vegetables, we cut and mix the vegetables together, which doesn’t interfere with tasting each one separately, but then we add dressings of various strong flavors on top, which tend to override the flavor of the raw vegetables. 

Some possibilities stand out.  In situations, most likely in the past, where food was scarce and food which had started to go bad had to be eaten, dressings could be used to mask any unpleasant aspects of the food ingredients.  I have read long ago that this was the origin of spices in India.  If so, why do we still do it with perfectly healthy, perfectly fresh foods?  Most recipes I have read tell you to start with fresh ingredients and then start to doctor them.

One variation of this involves food preservation.  Food that is temporarily available might be preserved, by putting it in brine, by fermenting it, by salting it, by freezing it or keeping it at low temperatures, by refining it into parts none of which is attackable by pests or which is easier to store and defend from pest (bacteria, insects, worms, anything).  If food preservation came into existence long after our food detection system had evolved, food preparation using preserved ingredients would have to have some tricks to get it past our detectors.

A second variation of this involves some natural material that is basically inedible, but can be transformed somehow, such as by milling and separating it, into something that is.  And the transformed food can’t be eaten raw, but must be further transformed before it is digestible or nutritious or palatable.  This means complicated food preparation.

A third variation, not too distinct from the last one, involves some natural material that is harmful, but which can be transformed into harmless by some process, such as heating, marinating in alcohol, or whatever.  The harmfulness doesn’t even have to be part of the material itself, but could be from adulteration, biological transformation, infection or something else.  If something has some chance of harming the body, does heating it, i.e, something like pasteurization, eliminate that chance and leave us with a useful food ingredient? 

Another situation is that people might have to eat foods they don’t like.  Why would someone not like a food that was healthy and safe – is this a failure of the food detection system in the head, where it classifies a perfectly fine food as dangerous or non-nutritious?  Perhaps if the system is based on familiarity, and a new food had to be introduced, it could be disguised by adding something to it.

Perhaps it was due to imperfections in the system – a perfectly good food is not only not familiar, but is similar to bad foods in some attribute, and the food system tries to bar it.  Included above are five examples where the logical mind, which knows that the food is edible, tries to trick the reptilian part of the brain, which operates more simply and classifies the food as non-edible.  Doesn’t it strike you as odd that we have a competition between different lobes of the brain, and carry the combat out into the physical world, where the smarter, later evolved part, fools the more primitive one?  Is this actually what we are doing by food preparation?

Another aspect relates to something not yet discussed – nutrition.  Does mixing things together, or heating them, or coating them, make nutrition more efficient?  This discussion needs to take place after an exploration of the nutrition system in the body. 

Even further, we have feedback systems in the body that control the amount we eat – sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.  Could we be trying to affect those systems, and for example, override a food limitation signal the intestine sends out so we can eat more, perhaps because we logically can predict that there will be no more food after a while and we need to fatten up in the near future.  Seasons in the northern and southern hemisphere would provide a motivation for this.

Could it also be that some food preparation is designed for alternative purposes?  There are special situations, where we want to protect the eaters from some possible harm, like infection, so we give them some ingredients that will assist in that goal.  This might be classed as a form of nutrition, but what about inebriation?  Maybe we want to prepare foods that produce good feelings not related to nutrition being improved, but related to some chemical change in our brains.  This is principally alcohol-related, but there might be others.

A more subtle goal might be the most powerful of all.  We feel good when we eat very nutritious and safe foods, but that good feeling comes from the food detection system anticipating the nutrition that is underway.  The detection system can be manipulated by using ingredients that create the great-nutrition signal without actually providing nutrition, perhaps little or none at all.  So, to have the eaters feel good, we can use food preparation to trigger the good feelings.  Since there may be hazards to blatantly fooling a natural system like this, we need to explore this goal before taking it as one to follow.  Delicious is not a synonym for nutritious and harmless.

So, there are at least eleven different motivations for why we don’t just eat our food raw.  If we are food preparers, would it help to know which of the ones we were targeting when preparing the food?  If we knew the goals exactly, could we better tailor the processes we use to accomplish it?  Here are the eleven already-mentioned possible goals, there may be more:

1.       Overcome food aging

2.       Use preserved foods

3.       Transform inedible materials into nutritious items

4.       Eliminate possible harmfulness in a food

5.       Overcome food novelty

6.       Overcome false bad-food signals

7.       Improve nutrition

8.       Override food limitation signals

9.       Provide some non-nutritional benefit

10.   Provoke some attitude change

11.   Make the food-detection system give great nutrition signals

Could it be our chefs and recipe-writers have forgotten exactly what it was that caused us to shift from some particular raw food only diet to food preparation in the extreme?  Are they doing things that are non-productive, wasting time on things that aren’t necessary, going down the wrong paths, missing what is important in food preparation, causing some losses in nutrition unnecessarily, or encountering other pitfalls?  If we are going to try to prepare food like good engineering teams would, we will need to sort out the goals of food preparation better than what we see in the food literature.