Before you answer, consider this:
Over millions of years, plants have develop sophisticated chemical engineering to
- absorb minerals from soil
- fight off harmful bacteria and fungi while synergizing metabolically with others
- send pheromone signals to neighboring plants and pollinators
- adapt to heat, cold, moisture, drought, acidity and alkalinity
- repair injuries
- coordinate activity of the roots, stem, leaves, and flowers
and much more.
The carrot, and every other plant you eat, is filled with biologically active molecules that signal to other biologically active molecules, including those within the same plant as well as others outside of it, keeping the overall system healthy, adaptive, and growing.
How does the carrot’s sophisticated technology help you?
While the carrot was evolving, your evolutionary forebears were also developing metabolic systems to take advantage of the biologically active molecules they were ingesting through their food. These biologically active molecules are used as building blocks, templates, and signals for our internal metabolic processes and those of our resident microbiome.
It’s been estimated that our hunter-gatherer ancestors regularly consumed between 50 and 200 different species of plants, and along with them, hundreds of thousands of distinct biologically active molecules.
Ancient fruits and vegetables weren’t like modern foods, of course – they were tougher, smaller, and scrawnier. That’s because they were far, far more nutrient dense than the foods of today, perhaps by a factor of ten or more. Today’s agricultural plants have been bred to maximize total yield, not nutrient content. As generations of plants are selected because of their size, they will evolve to contain more starch and water. Those are the “cheapest” Investments a plant can make to increase its mass. The increased yield means lower density of flavonoids, carotenoids, curcuminoids, and all the other nutritional goodies plants offer.
By comparison, the modern diet is highly constricted.
That’s why I routinely recommend to my patients
- a diet high in a diversity of plant foods
- nutritional supplements that provide a wide range of naturally-occurring plant-based nutrients in their native context
As a Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner, I am prepared to recommend targeted plant-based healing solutions that address the specifics of your condition. Please contact me for more information.
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