Undernourishment: Stealth Enemy to Health

Less is more; but in aging intention is the key.  We eat less, but sometimes leave ourselves exposed to accelerated aging, immune challenges, and weakening of skeletal-muscular system.  Learn:

•  why aging bodies require more intentional nutrition, 
•  how undernourishment accelerates biological aging, 
•  the critical role of protein, vegetables, minerals, hydration, and healthy fats in healing, 
•  why intuitive eating becomes less reliable with age and GLP-1 use, 
•  and simple daily structures that protect energy, strength, healing, and longevity. 

Transcript

Hi everyone. So today we're going to talk about a subject that might be a bit rising under nourishment. I think it's surprising because with the obesity epidemic and everyone on a GLB-1 antagonist, we are more focused on eating less, thinking that we're overnourished. However, in my work, I do see an epidemic of undernourishment that is related to GLP-1s, but it is also related to age. So welcome back to the Jolie Podcast and I'm Julia, the founder of Joey. We are dedicated to your wellness and dedicated to longevity through nutrition. And when we talk about undernourishment, I think this topic is so important today because our population is aging. So if you are over 60, this podcast is very important for you. And if you are on a GLP-1, this is very important for you. And if you do not fall in either one of those groups, it's important to consider the subject of nourishment because so often we focus on calories and the focus on calories takes us away from focusing on what our actual body needs function well.
(01:25)
And I'm going to address this topic because I've been running into some clients that are coming to me because they're having difficult dealing. They might have had a procedure, they might have broken a bone, they might have torn a tendon, strained a tendon, and the healing is going really slowly and they're doing all the things and still the healing is going slowly. And in talking to clients, we always go through, okay, what are you eating now? And it will be that in actuality, the client is having a difficult time healing because they are not giving their body the building block. And so this is why we're going to talk about this because we know that as we get older, healing, our ability to heal, it begins to slow down. And I wish to draw a difference between chronological age and biological age. Our chronological age is our birthday.
(02:22)
How many years old are you? Your biological age is how old your body is from a functional physiological point of view and your chronological age and your biological age do not necessarily match. In the ideal world, your biological age would be much less than your chronological age. So say if you're like me, you're 53. I want my biological age to be more like 40 because that puts me on a fabulous trajectory as it relates to aging. When you're in your 60s, you want your biological age to be closer to your 50s or even in your 40s. Biological age does not need to progres at the same rate as chronological age. And it is our biological age that really determines our ability to heal how quickly it happens and how easy it is for tissues to regenerate for inflammation to resolve and for strength to return.
(03:19)
So how do we quietly drift into undernourishment? How does this happen? Well, as we age, some very significant things again to shift. One thing that most people don't really notice is as you age, your appetite naturally decreases. And we tend not to notice this in our 50s, our 60s, and our 70s. We do tend to notice that in the 80s, 90s, 100s, people eat less. That is due to a natural decrease in appetite. And this is not imagined like, gee, I feel like I'm eating less. This is a well-documented phenomenon in aging physiology. And it comes because our hunger signals become blunted as we age. Our taste and our smell faculties can diminish and our bodies drive to eat weekends. And we can see how from a evolutionary point of view that those things happen because the people who should get the most food are the people who are the young people reproducing, going out hunting, going out foraging.
(04:22)
So we understand why this happens. But in our modern society, it's a mismatch because we can live, there's not a scarcity of food. We don't need to populate as much as we used to. And so we're able to live much longer with more vibrancy without it being a dream on civilization as it was back in the dark ages. It's not that way now. Instead, we want to live vibrantly because the older we get, we have more to give to society. And so it's important to know that your appetite will naturally decrease. Your thirst also follows a similar pattern. When you are older, you will feel the urge to drink left and left. And generally speaking, many older adults do not oversee until they're actually dehydrated. So we layer this onto a lifetime of dieting, a desire to say lean or believe that eating less is inherently healthier and you have the perfect conditions for granting undernourishment.
(05:24)
And this rarely looks dramatic. It doesn't look like we're developing an eating disorder or that we are intentionally depriving ourselves. Instead, it looks like we're sleeping meals, but we're not even noticing that we're sleeping meals. We're working through lunch or we're playing paddle or we're out gardening and we don't even realize that we've missed lunch. We don't even realize that we should have eaten. We eat light, but we're not eating enough. So we might go out for dinner and decide to have a light dinner, but in reality from a nutrient point of view, our eating light is not eating enough. And the corollary to this is there is still a holdover of prioritizing calories over nutrients. So in some cases we're getting adequate calories, but those calories are empty. Those calories are not covering all of the nutritional bases that we need covered. We're losing protein intake without realizing it.
(06:20)
So we might sit down and we might start with our potatoes and a little bit of salad. And by the time we get to that piece of chicken or to the lentils, we're not hungry. And so we're undereating our protein and we're eating the same view foods repeatedly. So as you're getting older, most likely you're not cooking for a family, you're cooking for yourself, maybe yourself and your partner and the variety of foods that you're experiencing is getting more and more narrow. We are creatures of habit. And so we end up cooking eating the same foods over and over again. And the result of that is a very limited nutritional profile. And the end result of all of that is that the body is functioning, but it is not well resourced. And when it is not well resourced and we need to heal, we come into a problem because healing requires raw materials.
(07:13)
The body does not heal with willpower. It does not heal with desire. It heals with inputs. There are physical things. Think of your body as a set of Legos. If you break the Lego set, there are Legos that need to be put back in place to put that Lego set back together. It's the same with your body. Every repair pota, whether it's a muscle, it's a tendon, it's a bone or its skin requires very specific building bloths. So let's think about what are some of the building bloths that our body needs to heal. Our body needs amino acid coming from proteins, both animal proteins as well as land proteins. Our body needs minerals like zinc, magnesium and iron. Our body needs vitamins like vitamin D, vitamin C, vitamin A, vitamin K. Our body needs essential fatty acid. So those are the breakdown molecules from the healthy fat that you would be eating.
(08:14)
And our body needs sort of nutrients that help to regulate inflammation, that help to decrease inflammation so that healing can actually take place. And without adequate amounts of these things, the body cannot only execute the healing process. So without an adequate amount of protein, aphollagen, of vitamins, of hydration, a fat, a photonutrient, our body attempts to heal itself, but it can't. And it can't because it doesn't have the pieces available to put together to make new birds. And it's like if we're trying to build a house, but we don't have all the materials or we're trying to bake a cake, but we don't have flour and eggs. We don't have the milk, we don't have the butter, we don't have the oil. We're going to have a hard time making that cake. We're going to have a hard time building a house without enough materials.
(09:01)
We might have a recipe. We might have a blueprint. We might be ready, willing, and able. The oven is on, it's reheated, we're ready to go. But if the supplies are not there, guess what? We cannot make a cake. And the other interesting thing is the body will definitely, definitely try. It will try us to sort of ram shackle things together. But that reminds me of we were making our French yogurt here and an ingredient was left out and it wasn't immediately evident. We put the batter in the oven, the French yogurt bread baked, we took it out, we let it cool, we cut it. It is literally my favorite of the kind of bakery items that we made. We cut it, we sliced it. It was like my treat and it was awful. And it was awful because there was one ingredient missing. With that missing ingredient, the cake really couldn't be made properly and it's the same with your body.
(09:57)
Your body will try to heal itself and it will do some semblance of healing, but the process of healing will be elongated or the input off will be suboptimal because your body didn't have some necessary ingredients. So it might heal, let's say a cut, but that cut, the union there might be very weak. So it keeps reopening and reopening and reopening or it might try to heal a bone, but the bone doesn't heal properly and so it's not as fully functional or it's more prone to rebreaking as opposed to healing stronger. So it's so, so, so important that we make sure that we have what's needed. And this is why someone can be active, they can be disciplined and they can be healthy on deeper, but they still may not recover at the seed that they expect or they need to because they're undernourished. Undernourishment also is a double edged sword because not only does it slow your healing process, undernourishment accelerate biological age.
(11:03)
So it slows the healing process by making it clunky. There have to be workarounds because we don't have the raw materials we need and it also lows it because as our biological age accelerates, the body begins to prioritize survival over optimization and when and you never ever want your body to do this. Let me tell you, this is not the recipe for longevity. When the body begins to prioritize survival over optimization, they repair pathways become secondary. Repairing things that are broken becomes secondary. Inflammation, it lingers longer. Muscle mass becomes hard to maintain and in prolonged cases, your muscle begins to break down more quickly and bone density declines more quickly. And here I just want to give a little PSA on bone density. So bone density naturally decreases as we age. However, bon can remineralize if they can restrengthen themselves your entire life. Until you are in the grave, your bones can remineralize.
(12:14)
They will remineralize if they have adequate nutrition and there isn't a presence of high sugar levels. So just to know that so many things that we think of as aging actually happens through undernourishment and a little underlying the PFA over consumption of sugar. So over time as repair becomes secondary, inflammation lingers longer, muscle mass is harder to maintain, this shifts our biological age upward. And even if our gronological age remains going at the same pace, our biological age can actually accelerate. So the worst case scenario is you're 70 years old, but your biological age is 80. We don't want that. And the happy news is our biological age can easily be impacted, can easily be reversed, can easily be slowed down based on what we're doing. So the standard to aim for that is very helpful, particularly as you get older, is to have daily nutritional benchmarks.
(13:18)
And that's one of the wonderful things that we do for our clients is we know what their benchmarks are and we make sure that they have them without even thinking about them. They have them. Without that, you need to be very intentional about tracking and here's where app are invaluable or keeping notes on your phone invaluable, even keeping a photo diary also invaluable. If you are 65 and older, nutrition and if you're on a GLP-1, nutrition must become intentional, not intuitive. It must be intentional, not intuitive because at this point your intuition, your feeling is going to throw you off. So one of my favorite breakdown of the things of the nutrients that you need is the wall's protocol. The wall's protocol was designed to address autoimmune disease. However, the foundation of the wall's protocol is to give your body everything it needs for repair and optimization.
(14:21)
And so oftentimes for clients, I will use that as the base of their program. We are going to fill in the bucket of the walls protocol. This is what I do for myself on the daily and this will, by doing this, you protect your biological age. And so each day includes a foundation of vegetables, cooked as well as raw. If you can only digest cooked vegetables, everything can be cooked. I never recommend that everything be raw, however, because different nutrients are available to us differently based on cooking process. And remember, they are fat soluble as well as water soluble nutrients. And the fat soluble ones really, really do benefit from cooking and your body is able to absorb them better if you've cooked them. So our foundation are vegetables. This is essential. A lot of cooked vegetable is what you need. Cooked vegetables are easy to digest, they're easy to absorb and they're very supportive of healing.
(15:20)
And the goal here is variety and color. We want leafy greens. We want deeply pigmented vegetables like red peppers, orange peppers, purple sand eggplants, ruby red, grapefruit, which isn't actually a vegetable, but still we need it. Carrot. We want vibrant vegetables. We're looking for color here and we want silver-rich vegetables, which are your gruciferous vegetables like your broccolis, your Brussels sprouts, your, not a sargass, your cauliflower, your colored greens, your arugula, your kale, cruciferous vegetables. Asparagus also good in terms of being a green vegetable and deeply pigmented. So that's your foundation of your lunch and your dinner is a foundation of vegetables. Second up is adequate protein. And this is non-negotiable because as we age, our teas will not guide our protein intake. It will cheat us almost every time. So protein is the primary thumbstrate or tissue repair. Collagen is made up of proteins.
(16:24)
Mussels are made up of proteins. Many of your enzymes that are necessary for the repair pathways are made up of proteins. Proteins are a non-negotiable necessity. So as we get older, we need to have meaningful abortions of protein. We need to eat egg, we need fish, we need beef, we need other clean proteins and plant proteins are totally valid. So you can get that through legumes through chickens, through white gains, through total. All of those are very, very valid ways of getting protein. The important note is not if you're eating animal protein or vegetable or plant-based protein. The important note is that you are getting your protein and we need healthy fat. Healthy fat, I are olive oils, omega-3 rich fish, nuts, and seeds. Why do we need these? In a world where oftentimes we try to avoid that. We need it because that provides the structural component of fell membrane and fats help regulate inflammation.
(17:23)
And as we referenced earlier, that allow some nutrients to be absorbed into the cell. They're like the fairy that takes certain nutrients of fat valuable nutrients into our cell, out of our gut, into our cell. So we need to have fat. Mineral rich foods such as bone broth, leafy greens get highlighted again and foods that look as close to how they came out of the earth as possible. They supply the micronutrients required for enzymatic processes involved in healing. And so case in point are oatmeal. People love oatmeal. At Jolie, we use oat groats, which you may not have heard of. That is what an oat is as you harvest it from the plant. It's a little seed. We use that because that's the most mineral dense way of having oat. Once you start refining them by making them Irish silk cut oat or making them even worse, rolled oat, you lose a lot of the nutrients.
(18:21)
So here we're talking about mineral ritual food, whole piece of whole food. And then lastly, hydration. And as we get older, we have to be proactive about hydration. Do not wait until you are thirsty to drink. If you are on a GLP-1, do not wait until you are thirsty to drink because your thirst sensation is blunted. So you must schedule your hydration and your hydration should consist of water, rocks, teas, and these need to be consumed throughout the day. It's best that you don't chug them that you have numbsy throughout the day, but I will say it's better if you're going to tug them than to not have them. For me, I know that it is better to hydrate throughout the day, but true confession, I am a chugger. I'm the person who pours a 16 ounce glass of water and I just stand there and I drink the whole thing.
(19:15)
It's not optimal, but guess what? It gets in the hydration and if I didn't do that, I'd probably be very dehydrated. So I'm giving you what to do, but to know that there's some wiggle room. So as long as you are attempting and trying and be intentional and proactive, you're making progress. You're getting closer to optimization than if you had done nothing or just said, "Oh, I can't do this perfectly so I'm not doing it. " No, no, no, no, no. So it's important if you haven't caught on yet, that structure as we get older is what is going to protect us from undernourishing ourselves. And this is an important shift and it is a shift that is important to recognize because I don't think in our society we look well upon kind of like planning, like the whole movement toward intuitive eating, which has its place and is really, really important.
(20:07)
It becomes less relevant the older you get because your signals become more muted. So instead of relying on hunger signals, we are going to rely on what we need. We're going to rely on structure, which means that we have that mealtime. So at one o'clock we eat, that nutrition is consumed whether we feel like it or not and that protein is consumed evenly throughout the day. So if it's one o'clock and it's time for lunch and you're like, "Oh, I'm just not hungry," I'm going to ask you to at least try and begin with your vegetables, move on to your protein and then go for the rest. And I will point out that it's quite common that when we're not hungry, this is so, so much a part of the life of my GLP-1 clients where you're not hungry, your hunger has been blunted, but you want to reach for a piece of bread or a cookie or potatoes or something like that.
(21:05)
No, no, no. We're going to start considering we don't have much on the appetite, we're starting with the biggest bang for our buck, which is our protein and our vegetables and then we move on to carb. As we begin to eat more intentionally and more, we rely less on intuition. We rely more on, okay, this is what I need to eat today. This is when logging and keeping track of what you're eating is really, really important and it helps you to be objective because since we are not relying on our hunger signals or our thirst signals, we're going to look objectively of have we adequately eaten the food that we need to eat today. And this process of logging will not only create awareness about where we are from a nutritional standpoint, it will actually help us to answer critical questions like, did I get enough protein today?
(21:57)
Did I include vegetables in my meal? Did I hydrate adequately? And without this kind of awareness, undernourishment canvases unnoticed for months, for years, for decades. So this is why we're going to develop habit of logging our food. And when you do this, you are going to be amazed by how healing changes. When your body is nourished properly, your inflammation will resolve more efficiently, your energy will return more quickly and your strength builds with less resistance and your body, I guarantee you your body remembers how to heal and as soon as you give it what it needs to heal, it will lock in and begin the healing product and it will happen better and faster than you thought was possible at your age, was possible in your condition. So this is really, really, really, really important and I want to leave you with a knowledge that slow healing is not just a function of age, that slow healing is often a signal that your body doesn't have what it needs.
(23:05)
And I want you to think about eating more strategically, more intentionally, more intelligently. And when I mean intelligent, I mean from a scientific point of view and with more profits that you are constantly moving, moving forward and there's nothing complicated about this, you will not fail, you will nourish yourself. It is about discipline and it is about just making it a focus that I need to nourish myself. And the reason I nourish myself is so that I can heal, so I can be strong, so that I have an insurance policy against whatever evidence might happen. And when you nourish your body, you will not only live longer, but you'll live more vibrantly, you'll live better and a bump, a scrape, a bruise, a fall is going to be far less detrimental to you if you have given yourself that your body needs. So I'm going to leave you with that today and I encourage you to connect with us, read our newsletter, send me a note, let me know how you're doing, enjoy the world of Joey life.
(24:13)
It is amazing how transformational our food is. And starting today, you're going to be more intentional about nourishing yourself. And as you sit down to your next lap, ask yourself, "Am I nourishing myself? Am I nourishing myself?" And hopefully the answer is yeah. And if the answer is no, then make one change. Maybe it's a glass of water, maybe it's a few berries, maybe it's a tomato, maybe it's a piece of chicken. Make one change to nourish yourself a little bit better. So that's it and I will talk to you later. I hope you enjoyed this podcast, the Jolie Life Podcast. And if this podcast helped you in any way, I invite you to share it with your friends and your family and whoever you come across that you think might be helped by this podcast. I would love to hear your comments and you can contact me at julia@thejolielife.com.
(25:08)
And please follow us on Instagram the Jolie Life. Our website is thejolife.com and it would be lovely if you would subscribe and if you would rate this podcast and go back and share this with someone. Let the ripple effect happen. Let the Jolie life be the beautiful life that keeps on giving. By beauty, lots of love.