Recently I explored some of the odd food cravings I’d experienced after antibiotic therapy. It raised the question of how my body knows the nature and location of a food I have never seen or heard of before that evidently contained what my body needed. Science has some of the answers, but not yet all. Science Health sciences show us that antibiotics can destroy one’s friendly intestinal bacteria. These bacteria perform crucial functions for us such as: producing essential nutrients that human bodies can’t make; digesting foods we can’t digest; processing plant hormones into the precursors of human hormones; and training our immune systems by communicating directly with our gut lining cells. Antibiotics and other pharmaceutical medications deplete nutrients in a variety of ways, either indirectly by harming intestinal bacteria, or directly. This creates a deficiency that must be filled. Other factors such as periods of stress, changes in climate, work, exercise, social relationships and parenting also engage or increase the function of particular cells, organs or biochemical processes. Then our bodies need to be supplied with specific nutrients that we don’t often consume, or more of something common like vitamin C and zinc during a viral infection. Our whole ...