The real goal of nutrition is the management of cellular
inflammation. Increased cellular inflammation makes us fat,
sick, and dumb (how about overweight, ill, and less
intelligent). Strictly speaking, diets are defined by their
macronutrient balance. This is because that balance determines
the resulting hormonal responses. This doesn’t mean you can
ignore the impact of various food ingredients on the generation
of cellular inflammation. This is why I categorize food
ingredients into three major classes depending on when they were
introduced into the human diet. The more ancient the food
ingredients, the less damaging inflammatory impact they will
have on turning genes off and on (i.e. gene expression). This is
because the greater the period of time our genes have co-evolved
with a given food ingredient, the more our body knows how to
handle them. Unfortunately, human genes change slowly, but
changes in our food supply can happen very rapidly. With that as
a background, let me describe the three major categor