We all know that when you buy organically grown food, generally you are buying the best there is to buy.  But, all food is actually organic; some gardens just have cleaner, healthier soil than others.

For example, food grown on the site of an old factory that used to make chemicals for the military is more suspect than food grown on virgin soil where no such dangers exist.  But looking at this in strictly biologically terms, all foods are the process of an organic existence. And, whether you know it or not, so are we. For plants, it all depends upon the value of the soil they grown in: For us it is a matter of what is the value of the food we eat.

Over the past several thousands of years we humans have sought to divorce ourselves from nature and biology, and we have succeeded in some small ways, but failed in many more important ways. For example, as we grow more sophisticated and become city dwellers, we no longer grow our own food, or at least do not do so in any substantial way. We hand that job over to others, mostly large corporations that have been buying out family farms for decades now, and creating super farms, efficient if somewhat lacking in the care and tender touch the farmers of old used to give their fields.

With the advent of canned and packaged foods we have substituted salt for flavour and sugar for pleasurable taste, to our own detriment. While we might eventually evolve into strictly fat, salt & sugar dependent beings, for the moment our bodies were made for hunting & gathering, and that is simply a biological fact.

We thus used to eat many varieties of foods, from ants to red meat, from leafy greens to root vegetables, berries in multitudes and so many other things that the average hunter gatherers might have more than seventy or eighty different food sources at hand per day!

In researching chimps, our closest biological cousins, the amount and variety of foods available to them make our local supermarket look almost pale in comparison, mostly in matters of freshness, but also in the variety of foods available. Yes, you can find a lot of food in your store, but how much variety of excellent food that is actually good for you? And even with as much variety as is made humanly possible in your veggie section, how many different kinds of vegetables do YOU actually eat? Most of us could count the number of different types on the fingers of one hand, or if you are exceptional, two hands.

Sorry to say, but even if we think we are doing ourselves right by eating strictly organic foods, it is the variety as much as the source that matters. To show this to yourself keep a tally of the different foods you eat over a two week period and then add up the variety. Either you will be very pleased or become very concerned, because to eat as well as our ancestors did 10,000 years ago, we would need about 80 kinds of plant food in our diet, plus a good two dozen or more animal food sources.

Not only are we not eating the variety of foods we need, and dare I say it is almost impossible to buy and store and eat such a great variety in today's society, we are also eating food that does not seem to have the same health benefits as before.  I am speaking of canned, boxed, processed foods that make claims of having vitamins and other nutrients you need to live.  Do they?

Well, the question is still out there as to whether or not processed foods actually offer anything of value at all.  The companies that make them claim they do, but I still have my doubts.  Did you know that simply by grinding grain it loses much of its micro-nutrient value?  So what does that mean?  Simply put, there are minerals, enzymes and countless other factors that are lost simply by grinding up the grain, leaving behind the husk and eating only the carbohydrate rich center.  Even the nutrient-rich germ is often lost, and in the seed germ are the many vital nutrients you need to insure good health and longer life.

As I mentioned briefly in my other two hubs Metabolism and Better Health parts 1 & 2, as we grow older we lose some of our ability to digest properly.  Think about Thanksgiving day or any feast day and the feeling you had if you ate too much.  As a child you might feel stuffed, but you'd run outside and play and that feeling was soon gone.  As adults we retreat to the couch and sit there until, slowly, everything moves out of the stomach and into the upper intestine.

Digestion slows, the uptake of vital nutrients slows, and before you know it, you have to eat a lot more to get the same nutritional value from your food as you did when you were, say 15 years old.  No wonder we get fatter as we grow older!  The combination of a sedentary lifestyle (usually brought on by the lack of energy in your body) and the fact that we actually absorb fewer vital nutrients, and we seem doomed to failure to just get fatter and less active! Yikes!

OK, we are the product of an evolving creature called Homo Sapiens, the human being, and we are also the product of our biological past.  Biology, nature if you will, has no particular plans to insure our personal survival.  There is, however, a plan of species survival, and that includes growing up healthy, having offspring, being there long enough to insure they grow up and have offspring, after which we as individuals are pretty much superfluous.  We no longer fit into the survival of the species, and therefore begin to age and die.

If it were written in stone that we could ony live a certain number of years, I would not be writing this hub.  The good news is that we can, by intelligence, figure out why our average lifespan is what it is where we live.  In the U.S. it's generally between 77.5 and 80 years, and if you look at many people, they are decrepit from the age of 65 onward.  Some few are still in great shape, but most people who survive to 80 years old are pretty well run down.  Why?  It all goes back to metabolism which creates energy which keeps you younger and alive.

Yes, life needs energy.  If you took away all your energy, you'd be dead. Death is the lack of vital energy to keep the body functioning.  It's as simple as that. No energy, no life.

Now figure what happens as you slowly and then more rapidly lose your energy.  Cells die and aren't replaced.  You lose muscle mass, brain capacity, kidneys fail, immune systems lag, life becomes unbearable and death seems like an old friend beckoning you to give up this horrible life.  Did you feel that way at 10 years old?  15?  30?  Do you feel that way now?

Ask yourself this simple question - if you had more energy, would your life be better than it is now?  Be honest, no matter your age, if you are over 30, you are slowly losing energy every day, every year, slowly at first, then more rapidly until.......

We think of age as a matter of birthdays. By fifteen I should be.... by thirty I should be .... by fifty I should be ,,,, by seventy I should be ... , and so forth. But what if I told you that birthdays do not dictate you age - biology does? Would you be at all interested in learning why this is so?

I can't stress enough that all of this is so well presented in Stephen Cherniske's revolutionary book The Metabolic Plan, which details years and decades of studies and scientific research into the process of ageing.  We do not have to plan out our lives by the clock.  Read this book, for it has information you will get excited about, a plan that may just possibly help you live a longer, healthier life.

There you'll learn about DHEA and how it may help you age slowly, even rejuvenate tired old cells into healthy new cells, and that, after all, is what renewal of biological life is all about.

It's up to you to learn as much as you can about how to stay young and healthy, or how to renew your biological life to the point where your body has the necessary energy to keep itself in excellent repair.  You have some leads here on research, so go out there and learn what you need to know!