Food as Fuel
What You Were Designed to Run On
Growing Place Chico does not prescribe diets or medical treatments. This document is offered for educational purposes only.
At The Growing Place, we are embracing the holistic realities of mental health and wellness, especially with regard to nutrition and movement.
Many of us learned to think about food through the lens of shame, size, or willpower. This isn't that. It's simpler — and the stakes are higher than you might think. Not just for you, but also for the people you care about the most and who need you showing up.
While there are many positive ‘whys’ for eating well, like clarity of thought, mental health, energy for kids and grandkids, and mitigating disease, the truth is that we as humans are designed with a certain type of sustenance (fuel) in mind. For our body and soul (mind, emotion, volition) to run well, we require foods (fuels) that are both uniquely designed and profitable for our whole being. The other fuel (ultra-processed), is not designed with our well-being in mind. Our BIO-Psycho-Social-Spiritual person is a holistic reality, meaning the body is not separate from the rest of who we are. And since we live in our bodies, it is beneficial to know what they need to excel.
Gas in a Diesel Car…
My wife’s car has a diesel engine. If we were to put gas in that tank by mistake, we’d have catastrophic issues — there’s potential for severe engine damage from misfiring, pre-ignition, and the failure of critical components, often leading to very expensive repairs or even engine replacement.
As an average consumer, one could argue that diesel and gas are largely the same. They’re sold at the same places, from the same pumps, and they both stink. They are both combustible, both oil-based fuels, and both energy-producing. They are just delivered from different colored hoses. If it were only that simple. The truth is, their specific properties are extremely different. How they create energy is very dissimilar.
At the end of the day (and without a doctoral degree in chemistry), gas in a diesel engine simply doesn’t work. The diesel engine was intentionally designed to operate on a different fuel, with the unique chemical properties of that diesel fuel in mind. The differences in combustion methods, fuel properties, lubrication, and engine fuel system design make gas very incompatible with the diesel engine. You could limp along for a short while, but it will soon become demonstrably obvious that the engine’s days are numbered.
The chemicals that regulate your mood, focus, and emotional steadiness,
are largely produced in your gut — from the foods you eat.³
In many ways nutrition is just as straightforward. The difference being that our bodies are remarkable at compensating for, masking, or even hiding the cumulative effects of the unhealthy, ultra-processed fuels we consume.² We may feel the impact in ways we don’t immediately connect to the foods that we are eating, such as in our mood, our sleep, our ability to focus, and even in how we process emotional joy or pain.
At the end of the day, how we navigate the natural versus ultra-processed journey of our human fuels, makes a powerful difference in every area of our lives. Everything from energy levels, sleep, concentration, and emotion regulation, to physical stamina, immune function, and overall well-being. Everything is influenced by the fuels we ingest.
Together with our clients, we seek to explore the personal and mental health benefits of transitioning to a more natural diet. Foods that are as close to their natural, original state as possible.
Some of the ‘misfiring and component stress’ that many of us experience in life may simply be exacerbated by, or rooted in the wrong fuel properties of our food. We’d invite you to explore what a shift toward more natural eating might open up for you.
A Whole-Food diet made depressed adults
4x more likely to reach remission.¹
References
The following peer-reviewed sources provide evidence grounding for the nutritional and mental health principles explored in this article.
Jacka, F. N., et al. (2017). A randomised controlled trial of dietary improvement for adults with major depression (the SMILES trial). BMC Medicine, 15(1), 23.
Martínez Steele, E., et al. (2016). Ultra-processed foods and added sugars in the US diet. BMJ Open, 6(3), e009892.
Yano, J. M., et al. (2015). Indigenous bacteria from the gut microbiota regulate host serotonin biosynthesis. Cell, 161(2), 264–276.
Cryan JF, et al. (2019). The microbiota-gut-brain axis. Physiological Reviews, 99(4), 1877–2013.
Firth J, et al. (2020). Food and mood: how do diet and nutrition affect mental wellbeing? BMJ, 369, m2382.
Gomez-Pinilla F. (2008). Brain foods: the effects of nutrients on brain function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(7), 568–578.
Jacka FN, et al. (2017). A randomised controlled trial of dietary improvement for adults with major depression (the ‘SMILES’ trial). BMC Medicine, 15(1), 23.
Monteiro CA, et al. (2018). The UN Decade of Nutrition, the NOVA food classification and the trouble with ultra-processing. Public Health Nutrition, 21(1), 5–17.
Rico-Campà A, et al. (2019). Association between consumption of ultra-processed foods and all cause mortality: SUN prospective cohort study. BMJ, 365, l1949.
Srour B, et al. (2019). Ultra-processed food intake and risk of cardiovascular disease: prospective cohort study. BMJ, 365, l1451.