by Dr. Francisco Contreras

Can a person’s diet accelerate aging? The answer is absolutely yes. Your body functions by depending upon a steady supply of nutrient proteins and other substances needed to keep you going. Although some of the elements are produced internally, most of them are obtained from the food you eat.

In spite of the body’s incredible capabilities, it is often impossible for it to convert junk food and chemicals into fuel. On the contrary, these poisons promote deterioration and an acceleration of the aging process.

Our bodies can are least moderately handle most of the toxins and poisons that we pump into them under one condition: that we limit the amounts. But they seem least able to handle too much food and too many chemicals and toxins for a large period of time. Obesity is a major cause for physical degeneration that leads to aging. In addition, very few obese individuals live into the upper ranges of longevity charts, which may be another reason the Japanese, whose diet causes them to be far slimmer than some of their Western Counterparts, outlive the rest of us.

Few argue that nutrition is directly linked to longevity. We truly are what we eat!

The body’s biochemical processes are not unlike the building of a house. Imagine that you just finished building the house of your dreams. Then for some reason you are forced to move to a faraway place like central Africa. You have the blueprints and a list of all materials, so you merrily resolve to build your house in Africa.

Upon arriving in Central Africa you experience a major setback. No home depot! The materials you need are not available, and those you can find are not of the same quality as those manufactured in your home country. This doesn’t mean that you can’t build a house. But it does mean that your replacement house, in spite of the fact that the same blueprints were used, will not equally compare to the original because of the limited supplies and the inferior quality of the material used.

The same is true for our bodies. Although all our chromosomes and genes bear all the correct codes and information necessary for the building and replacement of cells, if the materials provided to the body are of inferior quality, the body will reproduce cells of increasingly inferior quality. Physical degeneration is the consequence of eating foods of inferior quality that have been stripped of their necessary nutrients.

In the same way that a house is only as good as the quality of the materials, the body is only as strong as the quality of the nutrients it receives. If a house has a strong foundation, it can resist external disturbances. However, if the quality of the foundation is poor, or if the foundation is poorly laid, the house may fall. So it is that a deficiency of one nutrient can cause illness, and the absence of a single nutrient can cause death.