Today’s Brain Booster is: Re-discover your innate body wisdom, and re-establish your intuition with food.
In 1926, American paediatrician Dr Clara M Davis conducted a groundbreaking experiment involving 15 newly weaned infants aged 6 to 11 months living in an orphanage. The study entailed giving them total dietary autonomy over 34 natural UN-processed foods, including milk, grains, apples, bananas, carrots, raw and cooked beef, liver, kidneys, brains, fish, and a bowl of salt. They were allowed to eat whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and the nurses who served the food were strictly forbidden from speaking, guiding or showing any approval or disapproval of a child’s food choices.
The idea for the experiment came from Dr Davis’s observation that children seemed to possess an innate body wisdom where they instinctively adjusted their food intake to treat nutritional deficiencies and common illnesses without any adult guidance.
When the children first entered the study, many of them were in poor health since they’d come from an orphanage, and five of them suffered from rickets (a bone-weakening disease caused by a severe lack of Vitamin D).
The first child admitted to the study — a boy named Earl — had a textbook case of severe rickets, and Dr Davis felt compelled to try and heal him. So she included a small glass of cod liver oil — a potent source of Vitamin D — on his food tray to see if he would take it voluntarily. On pure physiological instinct, Earl began taking irregular gulps of the unpleasant-tasting oil. He continued to drink it until his blood calcium levels normalised, and X-rays showed that his bones had calcified and were completely cured of rickets. The very day his body was healed, Earl stopped drinking the cod liver oil, and never touched it or asked for it again.
He was not an isolated case of self-healing. Tune in to read about the rest of the children in the study.
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Today’s Health Headline is:
Food is big data for our brain and body.
Food is more than fuel.
Food is information.
Most people view food as energy. In fact the word fuel is sometimes used synonymously with food:
‘I’m going on a big hike, so I’d better fuel up.’
‘Make sure you fuel up for your workout at the gym.’
And while providing us with energy to keep our heart pumping, our muscles moving, and all our cells functioning is obviously one of the functions of food, it also serves as big data that dictates how our brain operates, and how our body, grows, repairs and functions.
Food choices are MOOD choices.
Food choices used to be SHREWD choices.
Food choices have now become SKEWED choices.
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What’s Missing From Modern Medicine is an understanding of NUTRITIVE MISMATCH — also referred to as nutritional mismatch or metabolic mismatch.
Nutritive mismatch happens when something we eat delivers strong sensory signals like sweetness, saltiness, fattiness, or specific flavours, but lacks the essential nutrients fibre or protein that your body and brain expect alongside those flavours.
I believe this is the most subversive aspect of Ultra-Processed Foods. To ‘subvert’ means to undermine an established system from within, through secrecy or deception. That’s exactly what UPFs do. We instinctively know what to eat based on a food’s taste and texture because taste and texture deliver a wealth of information to our brain and body that guides our eating.
Ultra-Processed Foods subvert that ancient evolutionary programming. They use familiar tastes and textures — like sweet, savoury, or creamy — to infiltrate our digestive tract, only to deliver completely corrupted data once inside.
Humans intuitively learn to judge how filling a food will be based on its flavour and texture. When food companies manufacture products with inconsistent flavour-to-nutrient profiles — like highly processed, thick, creamy snacks that are chemically stripped of actual protein or fat, the brain’s ability to moderate food intake is destroyed. That mismatch directly promotes overeating because the expected fullness never biochemically registers.
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Today’s Whether question is from Cassandra, and her question prompted this entire podcast episode:
I’m wondering whether you can provide advice on how to overcome junk food cravings?
Yes, I can! Tune in turn hear my answer.
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Click here to watch the episode on my YouTube channel, or listen to Healing with Dr Helena on your preferred podcast platform. I’ll publish a new episode every Monday, and you’ll receive an email notification that morning. Please subscribe to my podcast or YouTube channel so that you don’t miss an episode, and send your whether questions to: podcast@drhelenapopovic.com
If you’re happy for me to play your voice on my podcast, you can provide an audio file. Otherwise, you can type your question for me to read out.
I very much look forward to answering your questions, and exploring how we can all build a smarter brain, stronger body and deeply fulfilling life.
Please share this Health-e-Byte with everyone you know!
Photo Credit: A photo I took of artwork by Will Gordon while I was visiting Vancouver Island in Canada.
