Shameless Nutrition Cross Promotion

So, I have a colleague at work who has her own blog.  It's about nutrition or health or food or some such.  All I can really say is it has lots of pictures of food on it which Monique claims are all her own work.  The blog is called cookchewconquer http://www.cookchewconquer.com/ which seems to imply that you can eat your way to world domination.  It is a vastly more popular blog than mine which just goes to show the enduring popularity of either food or world domination.  I'm writing this blog entry in the hopes of clutching onto the claws of this high flying blog as it swoops past.

This means I have to write a blog entry about nutrition.  Nothing simpler; I write about things I don't understand frequently, indeed constantly.  I'm hoping that by writing this entry and posting a link to Monique's blog she will do the same for me on her (as I think I mentioned) much more popular blog.  I expect a payback Monique.

So, nutrition.  What do I know about nutrition?  Well I know how to spell it, that's a start right?  I know its quite important.  Or at least I know that a lot of people think its important which for popularity and revenue generating purposes is pretty much the same thing.  It is important enough to fuel blogs, university courses, lifestyle programs and a whole dietary supplement industry.  Thus nutrition is pretty damn important if only for the number of people it keeps employed.

Having thus confirmed that nutrition is indeed terribly important we can move on to an understanding of what it actually is.  Of course in a sane world we would have come to an understanding first and determined its usefulness later but I think we can all agree that whatever its qualities sanity is not something our world has a surplus of.  Incidentally, that's two sentences in a row that ended with a preposition, Winston Churchill would be outraged.

According to wikipedia, which makes up for its accuracy with its availability, nutrition is "the selection of foods and preparation of foods and their ingestion to be assimilated by the body."  It would appear that every time I visit McDonalds I am practising nutrition.

Naturally there is more to it than this (sorry Ronald).  If one is careful with the aforementioned selection, preparation and ingestion one can be healthier, live longer and have shiny eyes and a glossy coat.  Being healthier and living longer are generally considered to be good things.  They are certainly better than chronic illness followed by a premature death.  At least from the point of view of the protagonist.  Those who know him may have a different view.

Human beings actually managed to survived the first couple of hundred thousand years of their existence without making any more nutritional decisions than "has it stopped moving yet?"  Furthermore it was people on this somewhat dubious diet who moved human civilisation forward to a point where their descendants could be worried about nutrition.  All of which seems to prove that nutrition isn't really necessary.

So if nutrition isn't a necessity what is it?  Well, like most things we think we can't do without its a luxury.  Lest anyone think I'm overeulogising our nutrition challenged ancestors I would point out their life expectancy was short and what life they did have was riddled with diseases many of them due to poor nutrition.  So nutrition is a luxury but a luxury it is very good and useful to have.  Think of nutrition in the same way as you would google or heroin.  Sure you can do without them but after having tried them for a while you really don't want to.