Paramedichron #2

If your talk to a dietitian for any length of time about the American Diet, eventually the subject of nutrient density will come up.  The idea is that certain foods are nutrient-poor and that certain other foods are packed with vitamins and minerals.  Your goal, as a health-conscious American human, should be to maximize the nutrition of the foods you eat.  Sounds obvious.

Unfortunately, many of the toothsome items that we expect to be part of our day-to-day diet are packed with nothing but calories.  Evidently, you can apply the "yummy test" to any foodstuff, and if you really, really like it, it should probably be hidden on the top shelf, out of reach, out of view, or - better yet - left on the shelf at the grocery store.

Take, for instance, a cookie...  A delightful little nugget, consisting of sugar, simple carbohydrates, and fat, it offers little in the way of nutrition - even if packed with oatmeal, raisins, and nuts. It's a calorie bomb, specifically designed to tickle discreet receptors in our mouth and brain that respond to easy energy, a remnant of our hunter-gatherer origins. 

Once upon a time, buying groceries was extremely hard work.  Someone, probably the womenfolk, would have to traipse across the savanna, poking at the landscape, scratching in the soil, rattling the bushes, to fill the larder.  The menfolk, meanwhile, took part in ritual hunts that occasionally resulted in meat over a fire, but provided ample grist for tales of the One-That-Got-Away. 

Survival was hard, but evolution was kind, in time, to the early peoples who developed a taste for the sparse sugar or fat-laden "cookies" of the day.  Perhaps fruits, avocados, or rich fatty meats constituted the fortuitous treats to be had.  Regardless, our bodies evolved a mechanism that rewards calorie-dense consumption with a tiny chemical neurologic prize. Eat something sweet or rich, and you feel inexplicably good, even happy

I bring all this dubious anthropology up because I am suddenly immersed in studying Anatomy and Physiology.  The foundation of pending weeks of scholarship will be my understanding of basic biochemistry and microbiology.  I studied geology and chemistry in college, but I only have a sixth-grade biology education, which I dredge up from decades-old synaptic memories.  I am amazed that I remember anything, and, more amazing, is that what I remember is still relevant. 

The text I am reading, highlighting, and transcribing as notes, is nutrient-dense.  The information packed in its pages is the culmination of hundreds of years of scientific inquiry, and absolutely up-to-date. It is broccoli printed, bound, and delivered to my hands, and ultimately my brain. There is so much information on any given page that I frequently read it several times, before selecting the key facts that I will endeavor to commit to memory. I duplicate important diagrams and images, in the hope that recreating it will burn it into the fabric of my cerebellum. 

I am chewing, chewing, chewing, digesting the information with my note-taking hand, but the information is so mind-boggling, so arresting in its awesomeness, that I can't help but feel a tiny little tickle in my cortex, an electrochemical reward for understanding even a thin slice of our biological mechanics.  If I were a religious person, I would classify the feeling I get as reverent. As it is, the more I understand about the minutia of cellular biochemistry, the more dumbfounded I am. 

Life is amazing; learning is hard.