Several years ago when I was active in online forums trying to help people, an insane lady yelled at me when I talked about how the amino acid tryptophan in milk converts in the human body either to niacin or serotonin, depending on certain metabolic conditions in the human body, where niacin promotes metabolic activity and serotonin alternatively slows down the metabolism, both regulatory branches which help to run human biology. She was insistent that milk was a superfood and there was not only nothing wrong with it but that a person could live indefinitely on milk alone.

It is these very kinds of ideological conceptions of food and human biology why we have not yet cured a great many diseases. Nature and food have no concern for your opinions, beliefs, tastes, desires, wants, faith, or needs, even be they great. Our desire to control life and bend fate and nature to our will is always nothing more than an illusion constructed by our human psyche to help us cope with the difficulty that life can be. Desiring foods to be miraculously incredible in their nutritional profile is completely delusional, and a direct effect of marketing and advertising campaigns meant only to get you to buy shit or click on articles and not even a tiny bit meant to help you.

Milk can be very nutritious, but much of its nutrition also depends on the state of your health and not the other way around, having the ability to properly metabolize its amino acids and handle its very large phosphate content. Milk can be great for kids and while it has lots of other nutrients it is so deficient in vitamins K, E, D, and iodine, copper, iron, zinc, selenium, manganese, and oleic acid that it is not at all an ideal food for adults, and has too high of growth-associated animo acids and less of those which are inhibitory if it is used without complimentary foods like fruit and vegetables it would actually cause health problems. Most foods on this earth are in fact not actually intended to be food. From peas to honey to meat, most things we eat are not actually designed by their creators to be consumed specifically for human food (while honey is delicious it is also made by tiny insects with weapons built into their butts to defend it). Most fruit and vegetables have been systematically bred and cultivated over centuries by our ancestors into forms which make them more palatable, but even foods which are highly nutritious and helpful for our wellbeing are still based on their own original purpose, which is to perpetuate and support their own propagation, not ours, and as such are not designed to be “superfoods” for humans and usually lack sufficient nutrition to actually be that, no matter what marketing and ad campaigns might try to say otherwise.

One of my favorite nature facts is the trick oak trees play on squirrels in order to promote their own survival. Trees and other plants produce flowers, pollen, fruit, nuts, and seeds in part because other creatures will helpfully disseminate their offspring, and as enticement will make those products tasty and nutritious in exchange. But if those animals and insects consume an excess it would also eliminate those plant species. Having evolved to avoid this very problem, oak trees normally only produce enough acorns to support a moderate quantity of squirrel population, but every few years they will suddenly produce an incredible abundance of acorns purposefully, to overwhelm and confuse squirrels and by so doing increase the chances of seedling germination, since the relatively small population of squirrels cannot possibly eat them all, but only do this occasionally so as not to promote squirrel overpopulation, which would decimate their own chances at propagation.

This demonstrates how everything in nature is concerned first and foremost with its own survival, and why superfoods do not exist, and while foods like milk can be extremely nutritive no food is a superfood because not one single food on this planet contains even most of the nutrients we require as a human species, as well that our nutritional needs as a human being are also not only dependent on food. For instance we require sunlight as a nutrient as well, and many health problems which occur during our lifetime can be caused by sunlight deficiency. This is not relevant only for our levels of vitamin D but as well as regulatory pathways which respond to sunlight deficiency even if you have plenty of vitamin D because of our evolutionary past in which our body thinks that sunlight deficiency means wintertime, and as such artificial states of winter such as excessive time indoors actually alters our metabolic function entirely separate from the type of foods we take, which no food on this earth can change regardless of its nutritional profile.

Much of our health also depends on nutrients created by our own native gut microbiome, nutrients like the short chain fatty acids or vitamin K2 which are not even present in foods we normally eat but what must be made in our gut from other foods by those very microbes we harbor. These microbes can also be extinguished by exposure to toxic agricultural chemicals, which is why eating organic can be very helpful, but they can also die from vitamin D deficiency as well since, like the oak to the squirrel, we share vitamin D with our microbes in order to cultivate them for our own purposes. The reason we have such a broad, omnivorous diet as a species is precisely because no one food is even close to sufficient to provide for the demanding nutritional needs of such a biologically complex animal. When I was first getting well a certain forum to which I belonged advocated using lots of milk and orange juice to lose weight and be healthy, and it not only did not help with either of those things, it made a lot of my conditions worse, as did earlier diets which advocated low carb, or keto, or primal eating, or intermittent fasting, or religious fasting, or calorie counting, all of which led me to develop cancer, lose my hair, develop extreme insomnia, depression, anxiety, erectile dysfunction, among other things. To be who we are biologically requires a much greater scope of micro and macro nutrients than any few foods can provide. Indeed, we evolved into the species we are in the first place because our ancestors developed physical traits which enabled the acquisition of nutrients from a wide variety of sources. When it comes to human nutrition, a broader, not limited diet is the true superfood, one which gets for us the broad range of nutrients which are required in so many metabolic pathways that no one can provide on its own.

The idea of a superfood is in reality wishful thinking, which is a nice way to cope with life but comes with some very serious consequences if it gets out of hand. If you struggle with health problems, limiting your diet is one of the absolute worst things you can do to yourself. This usually leads to the obsessive search for some miracle food you are missing, when in reality you are just missing all the foods. Getting plenty of nutrition from a broad profile of foods is one of the most important things you can do to support your health. If your repertoire of food choices are limited, spend time perusing my recipe collection. Try new things, don’t be afraid to eat stuff you’re not used to. The more new experiences you have the more confidence and familiarity you will develop, and eating better will come more naturally.