Compensatory Gain

~ This article first appeared in The Leader Vindicator newspaper. ~

Compensatory Gain

Cattle possess a survival trait known as compensatory gain that enables them to quickly return to good health and condition after an extended period of low feed quality.

If a cow is forced to consume inadequate feed due to drought conditions or some other factor, she’ll survive the drop in energy by utilizing fat reserves stored on her body.  As fat reserves are depleted, the sole mission of her body is to return body fat to an optimal level and reestablish equilibrium that enables successful breeding, foraging, and mobility.

When her stressed system detects a return of lush, nutritious food, it doesn’t waste a moment springing to action.  In a desperate effort to capture as much of the valuable energy, vitamins, and minerals as possible, a cow can experience daily weight gains at twice the rate of a normal growing bovine.

The lesson we learn from cattle is that a deviation from quality diet will result in a drop in body condition and health.  When the suppressed system is exposed to rich food, the influx will trigger a much more violent reaction as a body attempts to gather nutrients and return to the best possible existence.

You, too, have a system that’s remarkably well-tuned for stashing fat when the opportunity arises.

Peoples’ bodies haven’t changed much since the beginning of time; we function pretty much the same way we did a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, and so on.  In other words, in 2020, we’re still wired to survive fluctuating nutrition by collecting and storing fat during the good times in preparation for the inevitable misfortune that Gary’s spear glanced off the Wooly Mammoth – AGAIN – and nobody in the village gets to eat for a few days.

On the other hand, our food has changed dramatically.  Nutrition that used to be harvested and consumed in a complete state has been analyzed and adulterated into a list of ‘good’ ingredients and a list of ‘bad’ ingredients.  Today, as long as a flavored sugar drink contains a token ‘antioxidant’, it’s healthy.  If it has fat, it’s out.  Real food’s public ruination is so complete that people are instructed to avoid eating it, and they listen.  The first thing a doctor gives a patient is a list of food to eliminate, and the stuff on the list is nutrition-packed, single ingredient sustenance: meat, milk, eggs, etc.  Why doesn’t the list advise the avoidance of fake fat, synthetic sweeteners, artificial flavors, and imitation protein patties?  In an effort to improve health conditions of the population, people are consuming the human equivalent of bad cow food. 

I wonder if the acute sensitivity people experience towards whole and complete foods is the broken result of our own compensatory gain system.  If a body has been diligently denied nutrition in its original state for decades, perhaps the extraordinary biological craving for those nutrients will eventually corrupt into an extraordinary rejection of them.  Following this logic, a person who avoids a specific food for fear of getting fat will be a person who gets fat quickly when they ingest a trace of that food.  As the diet eliminates a greater variety of wholesome nutrition, the precariousness of the situation increases proportionally, thus driving the person further into a fake-food black hole.

The burden can be compounded through generations.

In his book Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives and Our Lives Change Our Genes, Dr. Sharon Moalem guides readers through various scenarios in which environmental stimuli of the parents affected the genetic makeup of their offspring (in the cattle business we refer to this phenomenon as epigenetics).  These genetic studies make it easy to deduce that parents skipping out on critical nutrition by way of dieting will pass the suffering on to their kids, who will enter the world without a genetic knowledge of wholesome food.

This may explain why so many people exist on a diet of bleached chicken tenders, pasta, and soy milk; they’ve been starved of reality so long that their systems violently reject whole milk, steak fat, real strawberries, lettuce with a little dirt left on it, or any number of other common ‘food threats’.  Unreal food is the only food tolerated by a damaged digestive system, and, unfortunately, exposure to wholesome nutrition simply drives the eater farther away from reality when the experience comes back negative.

Society is running away from nourishment as though dining is a deadly activity, resulting in people who live like a pen full of starved cattle: they’re primed for compensatory gain.  This precarious state is voluntary.  People choose to eat this way when their idols endorse imitation milk or their doctor recommends eliminating red meat before the hospital gown is fully secured.  It makes so much more sense to eat a diverse diet of wholesome food because the diversity stabilizes our digestive system and eliminates the worry of consuming a wrong ingredient.  In order to make a definite change in the world, we need a generation of young people willing to jump off the fake food wagon, optimize their health with real food sourced from people they know personally, and procreate abundantly to yield a new generation of resilient, healthy people who can thrive through life, even in the presence of an egg yolk.

That doesn’t sound like too bad of a mission, does it?