Nutritional Body Basics: The Mind Body Food Connection (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780978660321)

I want you to imagine you're starting a new job and you're very happy because it pays twice as much as your old job. But when you walk into the room you see ninety-six small scales each about the size of a quarter and your job is to balance out all the scales.

So what's the challenge? Well, what you discover is when you put a weight on scale fourteen, scale thirty-two goes down. When you put one on scale sixteen, scale forty-eight goes up. So as you try to balance all the scales, you begin to learn what causes what specific scale to go down and which scale or group of scales causes another scale to rise up.

Bottom line, your body needs ninety-six essential nutrients every day to balance out and when you don't achieve that balance, something's going to go wrong and that wrong imbalance is going to express itself with a specific condition. So how do you detect that condition? It's going to start with several micro symptoms. What are those?

Those are the small signs that your body is using to tell you that the nutritional scales are out of balance.

So what causes this imbalance? For every vitamin and mineral you can think of, draw an arrow in four different directions. Every vitamin has a vitamin it's attracted to, a chemical magnet. For example, vitamin E is attracted to copper.

When you go to the vitamin store and buy calcium, when you look at the bottom of the bottle it says excipients, so what are excipients. In this instance it's the vitamin needed as a synergist to absorb that vitamin, in this case magnesium. Every vitamin also has another vitamin that is an antagonist. Meaning, it prevents the absorption of that vitamin when taken in large amounts. For example too much potassium will interfere with your body's ability to absorb zinc and visa-versa.

Normally there is a list of three or four vitamins, that will interfere with the absorption of another vitamin. Every deficiency of a vitamin or group of vitamins, will cause certain micro symptoms and eventually advanced symptoms. And the reverse is also true. Meaning every vitamin causes specific symptoms when your body receives too much of it.

This is called hypervitaminosis. A tremendous amount of one specific vitamin and not enough of the vitamin that balances it out. Every vitamin and mineral has multiple functions in your body, not just one. As you do in-depth studies on each vitamin and mineral, you will discover and eventually connect those symptoms that are caused by an overdose or a deficiency of a specific vitamin or mineral.

That being said. let's talk a minute about precursors. A precursor is a nutrient that your body uses to make another nutrient and the nutrient it makes is perfect for your body it's what's known as bio-available. Why is it perfect? Because your body made it. Here's an example. Your body uses beta carotene to convert to vitamin A, but only enough that your body needs and then it stops. People tend to use Beta-carotene and vitamin A interchangeably as the same thing but it's not. Beta-carotene is converted by your body to create vitamin A, so beta carotene is an important precursor.

So how does a person reach a point of hypervitaminosis or the opposite which is a nutritional deficiency? Believe it or not, normally you eat your way there. We said earlier your body need ninety-six nutrients to balance out. Every piece of food you consume contains a list of nutrients including vitamins and minerals. So how do you overdose on vitamins? If every food contains vitamins and minerals, that means if you have a favorite food, you have a favorite vitamin.