Food as Information and the Strange Case of Delayed Implantation in Bears
We may not be thinking BIG enough
Today I want to let my worlds collide and share something from my biology work that I think is an example of how our reductionist approach to food and nutrition is limiting our thinking and ultimately killing us.
Earlier this year I wrote a piece called “What you actually crave is a connection to real food”, in which I talked about the idea that food is both energy AND information. And that finding food made up a huge portion of our daily lives.
We are hardwired to seek food, gather it up and store it for our survival.
Think about it.
If you go back even a few hundred years, large portions of your day would be spent obtaining, preparing or storing foods. There were no fridges and freezers. Food had to be collected when ready and stored properly for the future. Do this or die.
. . . . . The point is, you are still that ancient human on the inside. And a couple hundred years of modern living isn’t long enough for massive biological evolution to occur.
And that means, your brain and your body are still hardwired for the purpose of searching for, obtaining, and processing food YOURSELF.
But in our reductionist Western science, food is talked about as calories and as a composite of independent nutrients. We pretend interactions don’t exist.
A whole apple is an amazingly healthy food and a good source of Vitamin C and magnesium. . . . but drink it as apple juice instead and it is a sugar-time-bomb for your body that can spike blood sugar and disrupt insulin management.
My point is that all too often we are having conversations about how a food has magic ingredient X that does Y in the body, and we ignore the bigger system of cues going on.
Without the fiber of the whole apple, your body doesn’t receive cues to be full and so you can readily drink your way through multiple apples without realizing it and without real benefit (except to the juice manufacturers).
We forget just how complex the food-body relationship is
Yesterday, I was providing a bear safety and attractant management lecture at a local community. I like to go over the bear reproductive cycle to help people understand the timeline of events, especially because we deal with both Black bears and Grizzly bears here.
October/November is a critical time for Grizzly bears. It’s when they get pregnant.
So even though breeding season was months ago - sometime between late May and early July - the females don’t get pregnant right away. Bears have what is called Delayed Implantation. The embryo is created, but held in the female’s body as she goes about her summer and fall seasons.
A female Grizzly bear ONLY gets pregnant if she has accumulated enough fat to support herself being pregnant. Without this fat store (at least 19% by body weight) her embryo(s) will not implant.
This is a mind-blowing example of food as information for the body. If the minimum threshold of fat and body weight are not achieved by the female through hyperplasia (aka - when bears eat like crazy in the fall trying to gain weight for winter), then there will be no bear cubs next spring.
Grizzly bears serve as an important umbrella species for ecosystem health. We often say that you can tell how the ecosystem is doing by monitoring how many cubs female Grizzly bears are having and whether those cubs are surviving or not.
Now stop and think about this for just a minute.
No - humans do not have delayed implantation - that is not my point.
My point is that extremely complex systems have evolved between bodies and food systems, and yet we think that counting calories is how we are going to stay healthy as humans. . . . . . .tell me what’s wrong with that picture!
All food is not just calories.
We evolved eating complex, whole food, seasonal diets for a reason.
Cornflakes and Chef Boyardee are not legitimate substitutes!
Neither is lab grown meat, low fat dairy, vitamin-enriched anything or plant-based concoctions pretending to be something else.
Whole foods provide critical information to our bodies about the environment we are in.
If we are in a nutrient-poor environment, our ancient bodies will respond accordingly.
Ultra-processed foods tell our bodies we are in a nutrient-poor environment.
Throwing man-made drugs at problems created by a lack of whole food nutrition is only making corporations wealthy and keeping people alive longer with chronic illness instead of restoring health.
It’s time for us to start thinking bigger when we talk about human health and nutrition. No single super-food or nutrient is going to be the silver-bullet. But there are many amazing foods that can contribute to health in a whole-food diet.
I was also at an Indigenous Law workshop this week being facilitated by ILRU. We were looking at various pre-recorded St'át'imc stories and extracting out the lessons and laws. No surprise my group was doing two bear stories. But these exercises also reminded of how closely tied the traditional diet and knowledge of the people is to the bears that they have shared the land with since time immemorial.
Each one of us has ties to a cultural diet somewhere in the world, or to an adopted traditional diet in the place we now live.
It’s worth the time and energy to learn more about what “food is information” actually means. For female Grizzly bears, food determines whether cubs will born. For us humans, food determines whether we are living well, or struggling with disease.
What information is your food giving your body today?
Share in the comments
Thank you for this insightful article about the information contained in food. The more I learn about how our bodies are calibrated to react to whole foods that we gather and prepare ourselves, the more convinced I am that society has gone off the food rails.
The best we can do is limit the ultra processed foods and add back in as many natural ingredients as possible.
Great article. Totally agree. Also, didn't know that about bears! 😯