Real Body Composition

 
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Current calculations put the Big Bang as occurring about 13.7 billion years ago which was the beginning of the primordial Universe that was composed of hydrogen, helium and a little lithium. From these elements the first stars were born, which in their interiors the heavier elements found in Nature such as carbon were created. Given sufficient time, and depending on the size, these stars ended their lives in a spectacular fashion by exploding and thus seeding the Universe with their components. These elemental components through an elegant dance began to amalgamate into various mixes which form the Universe that we see today.

One particularly varied combination of elements coalesced into a planet which allowed for a certain mix of elements to organise into a form that could replicate itself. Over millennia these replicators become more and more complex by learning to incorporate more of the mix into itself and use it for increasingly elaborate functions. The result (so-far) of this process is us and all the life-forms upon a collective home, called by us, Earth.

Although you may feel separate and fairly permanent, a key idea to grasp is how connected and impermanent you actually are. Your body is a temporary composite of the ancient material that continually, instant by instant, flows through you in the form of solids, liquids, gases and vibrations. Some of this material is fairly long haul others are more fleeting day trippers. Who you are now is the reflection of this flow. The skin you see in the mirror is mostly made of the flow in and out of you during the previous two weeks, the blood in your veins from the flow of the last 4 months, even your bones who almost completely anew from this flow once every 7 years. Moment by moment you are reconstructing and exchanging yourself with the Universe.

If you look at the image alongside this piece you will see that far from what you are told annually by the popular media the key to a healthy and high performance body and mind is not the latest flavour of the month super-food or supplement, but a precise mix of ancient substances that make up the human body.

By simple arithmetic you can see that three quarters of your body are made from just two elements – oxygen and hydrogen, mostly combined together in the form of water. The second largest substance that makes you and me is carbon (oxygen is the first with hydrogen being third) which is certainly the basis of life (as we know it) on this planet, if not throughout the Universe (although silicon has the necessary properties too). If we include nitrogen into this mix, at three percent, then this combination of four elements account for over 95 percent of your body.

These four elements are provided by the air you breathe, the water you drink and the protein, fats and carbohydrates that you eat. If you’re getting these basics wrong by breathing in polluted air, drinking impure water and eating foods that do not contain the correct types of protein, fats and carbohydrates, then no matter what you do, or how much you spend, wish, hope, pray or will it to be, it will amount to nought because you’re not creating the basic structure for the remaining few percent to integrate optimally.

The remaining few percent of your body are mostly minerals which are in descending order of amount calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, sodium, chloride and magnesium. Combined with the above four elements (CHON), these eleven substances make up 99.9 percent of your structure. Thus to build and maintain your framework optimally you need to seek these substances via your food choices. And because they occur in different proportions in different sources you need to make sure you’re covering your bases by eating a wide variety of foods.

Although all of the rest of the nutrients combined only account for 0.1 percent of your structure they are no less important. Iodine, for example, is only required in the amount of 150-300 mcg (micrograms). Just for clarification, a microgram is a millionth of a gram; pretty tiny. But without regular inclusion of this miniscule amount into your structure, your body becomes rapidly dysfunctional and diseased. So, on a daily basis your body sorts through all of the food you eat, the air you breathe and the water you drink to locate this, for all intents and purposes, invisible substance, which it then incorporates into your structure so that it can continue to function and exist.

This simple premise should underlie almost your entire approach to nutrition, if not life. You should attempt to provide yourself with the environment so that you can optimally enable this flow of ancient substances through your body in the correct proportions and in the least contaminated way possible. That way, the DNA that resides within you can express itself in response to the environment to which it evolved. Given the right environment the abilities that lay dormant within each of us can begin to be realised; abilities that will astound even the most pessimistic of us.