Have you ever experienced that situation where the same ingredients in two different foods or drinks have different effects in your body?
As a rational thinking scientist, I would have thought that’s not possible. Or else attributed the difference to some other factor such as bad chemistry, contamination, an off batch etc. But those rationalisations have not held up to my repeated experiences of this phenomenon. That’s especially so since a whole bunch of people can be consuming the same stuff with me and not have any ill effects.
The Blood Orange Tree
The first example that got me pondering was the fruit of my blood orange tree. Citrus fruits, especially oranges and their extracted juice, gave me migraines the very next day. Once I was living in a place with a blood orange tree next to my house. It was in a poor state, having been neglected for years. I lovingly pruned it, cleaned up around it, watered and fed it. Then along came a crop of oranges. I tried the juice. No migraines. I never got migraines from my blood oranges, yet did after consuming other oranges and their juice. Doh? Then a sudden insight hit me: the difference was not what but who! The origin of my blood orange juice was my loving care of the tree, the fruit, the preparation of the juice, and even the juicer and the drinking glass. OK, so that’s an interesting working hypothesis…
Fair Trade Chocolate
A few years later I had another experience with food, this time with chocolate. Chocolate was a contributor to migraines. Moreover, the sugar in our crass local brand tore my tongue to bits and so I stopped eating it. Then along came the silky smooth, boutique European chocolates. Less sugar, no ripped-up tongue, but still migraines. Next, I worked for a health magazine and researched chocolate for an article, which is how I discovered fair trade chocolate and tried some. No ripped tongue AND no migraines. So, I wanted to put this to the test. I ate a big chunk of fair trade, organic, rapadura-sweetened chocolate every day. It took literally ten times as much of this type to give me a migraine. I read the ingredient labels on the crass chokky, the sophisticated Euro chokky and my new FT passion. The same. Same cocoa products, same cow milk, same sugar chemical (sucrose), same whatever, whatever. Working hypothesis revisited. Could it be the lack of abuse of workers in producing the ingredients of the fair trade chocolate that made the difference between the products? What about contamination from pesticides in the crass and Euro versions? So I tried organic, non-fair trade chocolate of the same ingredient composition as the others – migraines. That was enough scientific evidence for me to believe the evidence of my body. Of course it would have made more sense to simply accept the evidence of my body in the first place without trashing myself to get to the reductive science of it! In any case, that was the end of chocolate for me. Sure, the energy in fair trade had less abuse, but it still gave me migraines.
Vegan Cheese
You’re reading the words of a confirmed and committed (ex-) dairy queen here! Just to be clear, I have NEVER had any allergies – nothing that modern medicine could record in any tests. Nor had I any symptoms from consuming dairy i.e. none of the stuffy nose, sinusitis, bad breath, nausea, etc. that dairy intolerant people experienced. However, there was a lot of talk around me about the evils of dairy, and people were quitting. I wasn’t ready to do so. Nevertheless, I did care very much about the health of my kidneys and experimented with ways to reduce acidity. Our blood is an amazing buffer and holds its acid-alkaline ratio tightly between pH 7.2 and 7.4, just a little more alkaline than neutral. Outside this range, it’s ambulance time. It does this balancing act with the help of the kidneys which pump acid out into the urine for excretion as fast as they can go. Add lots more acid and that’s extra work for them. Hence my few months of deleting and adding back various foods and measuring my urine pH every morning to see what worked. The only thing that brought the pH of my urine from unacceptably acidic to near neutral was no dairy. Hmmm, says dairy queen. I did cut back on the amount of dairy I was eating, but did not altogether quit. Then one day my body clearly said ‘enough!’ and I quit totally.
A few years later, along came vegan cheese. Gluten-free, dairy-free vegan cheese. OMG! I hopped into it: some were weird, some were yummy and indistinguishable from dairy cheese. But guess what? Stuffy blocked nose, kept awake half the night trying to ‘swallow my tonsils’ with thick mucous so firmly stuck onto the back of my nose and throat that I could not get it out. And bad breath. And nausea. And sinus headaches. What the? The cheese had cashews and olive oil, both of which I can eat as nourishing foods with no problems. But together– how can that be a problem? And then it hit me: it was the intention that went into making the cheese, and my intention in eating it – all about comfort. My body had reached the point where it said no to comfort, only yes to nutrition and evolution. End of vegan cheese – which made me reflect back to the chocolate situation, which of course is also all about comfort.
De-alcoholised Organic Wine
I never tried it. It was clear as a bell to me that the energy of alcohol production and consumption is only ever about comfort, numbing and addiction. Taking out the ingredient ethanol and growing grapes organically was not going to make any difference in the toxicity to my delicate energetic body.
Consciousness and Energy
So, through the arrogance of trial and error, all the while ‘secretly’ knowing the truth, I had to accept the facts. Notwithstanding the unarguable or debatable harm of various ingredients, the human consciousness and energy behind the growing, making, selling and our choosing of foods and drinks to consume is the final cracker (no pun intended)! So why wait for our bodies to go blah! before we no longer consume something? What about stopping to check in with our bodies, our conscious (or supposedly sub-conscious) intention and our inner knowing before even heading to the fridge, or even going to bed self-nurturingly the night before? I’m no ‘angel’ in this process, but through willingness to walk the path of my own wellbeing and the effect my energy has on others, I’ve come further than I once thought possible.
Just sayin’!
By Dianne Trussell, BSc Hons, Scientist, Lismore, NSW
Further Reading:
A look at evidence and energy
The Body Knows
Is Truth Deeper than Words?
43 Comments
Practical and insightful, a true piece of wisdom
Science meets sense… I love your writing Dianne and the profound, playful, open, honest way that you share. Thank you.
You have brought in a refinement Dianne to the process of why a food or drink is truly supportive or not, and added the energy behind both how food is handled before we purchase, and why we choose to eat it. Sometimes a food or nutrient like a supplement is just not correct for that time period and the body vetoes it, but it may want it at some other point. I recently have been working with a naturopath who is very focused on developing a relationship with the body, one thing we did immediately was to decide for me to have a break from all supplements to give the body a chance to communicate what was or wasn’t needed. From this I realised I had been taking a lot of things but from stress and panic about my health. After a short time I re-introduced some supplements which were very needed and supportive of my wellbeing, but overall I cut back substantially and the outcome has been an almost complete healing of persistent nausea. My body had been communicating loudly about this but I wasn’t looking at my supplements as a possible cause, probably because supplements are seen as doing a ‘good’ thing for the body.
You ask this question Dianne
“What about stopping to check in with our bodies, our conscious (or supposedly sub-conscious) intention and our inner knowing before even heading to the fridge,”
For me I as I head to the fridge or the cupboard there is an overriding desire to consume something that will dull me so that I don’t have to feel the magnificence of who I am. I just cannot seem to handle such a feeling. And the voice in my head says that’s okay you don’t have to. What I am missing here is the energetic factor that is always present to dull us all down so that we don’t get to feel the truth of who we truly are because if we realised this then the overriding energy we are all playing with will not have a hold over us anymore.
Lovingly produced foods that sustain our immunity will bring much understanding to how our bodies do not get sick from foods, thank you Dianne for opening our eyes.
I have just discovered vegan cheese too. Although I’m not aware of any ill affects in my body I know without a doubt that it’s a comfort food for me. I wouldn’t have touched it a few years ago (after giving up all dairy) but it has found its way into my awareness and my shopping basket! Your article is well informed and I love the attention to detail and dedication you have to nut out what is truly going on with food and the affect it has on our bodies. I guess you could apply this to everything we buy as everything holds the energy of where it comes from and who manufactures it. Very eye opening.
I know from my personal experience of growing up that our minds can lead us into all sort of trouble and sometimes in my case dangerous situations that had my body screaming no don’t do that but I did. I now understand that the mind is cold and calculating and doesn’t care for the body at all. It just wants its own way and will go to extremes to get it.
We like to think we are ‘in control’, but sometimes I feel myself reaching for something that’s not good for me yet I still do it, so who IS in control here? What is the part of us that chooses to ignore what we know to be true but we choose to do it anyway.
How many of us wants to know that the energy we are in affects others? To me this is huge because it’s another one of those massive topics that has been withheld from our education. So then I have to ask myself what energy am I in as I go about my day. Recently I have felt a deeper sense of settlement in my body and when I tap into this and then move within it, I feel the harmlessness of it. I cannot always hold this deeper quality but to know it is there and to realise that actually it has always been there is like meeting a dear old friend after years of separation.
It’s perfectly possible to tuck into the healthiest of foods in exactly the same energy as someone might smoke a joint, with the sole intention of obliterating all feeling.
Ah yes, I have experienced that. I often had stomach pains and bloating after the ‘healthiest’ of salads and it took me a while to realise that it was the energy I was eating it in! You can try, but you can’t escape what the body knows can you?
What a great comment Alexis, and doesn’t that highlight that the key ingredient is energy and intention!
Thank you for sharing, Dianne. I have had very similar experiences with either the same or other types of food. Sugar gives me immediate sore throat and swollen tongue, salt ulcers on tongue (ouch!), dairy and gluten flatulence and diarrhoea, etc. Yet still at times I actively choose to eat organic, fair-trade dairy-free gluten-free sugar-free snacks thinking that it’ll all be fine until it actually is not and my whole body feels tired, sleepy and grumpy with my stomach very grumpy, noisy and ‘expressive’ (if you know what I mean. Yikes!). The body obviously is purifying what it’s willing to incorporate into its delicate and pure being yet the mind thinks it could get away with some delusional trickery?! Such impure intentions are definitely not going unrecognised but in fact embedded and imprinted in the ‘perfect’ snacks so evidently. This strong bodily rejection is, as you pointed out, a good reminder, but only a start, for us to look and reflect on our state of beings and the reasons why we have come to make such choices – withdrawing, not wanting to deal with life, avoiding conflict, digressing from purpose, etc.
And sugar makes my teeth feel like I’ve been chewing on tin foil, eek!
“And then it hit me: it was the intention that went into making the cheese, and my intention in eating it – all about comfort. My body had reached the point where it said no to comfort, only yes to nutrition and evolution.” Thanks Dianne, there is more to look at with food than just ingredients, and this is because there is more to us than just a physical body. I have also been learning that what I eat impacts both the body and the being, starting with the energy first. For a while there I was baking a simple biscuit for breakfast, it was almond meal, beaten eggs and little water, and then placed into a tray like a pastry and sliced into bars before baking. After a while I began to feel so heavy from this, even though it wasn’t from overeating, or from those ingredients that I ate separately on other occasions. I came to realise my recipe had a consciousness around biscuits, maybe comfort or reward, and I couldn’t deny feeling weighed down with heaviness after I ate it. I could only scratch my head for a while because it didn’t make sense to my logical mind related to the ingredients, but after I changed to eating just raw almonds or eggs cooked traditionally like omelettes, the heaviness left – so it was the heaviness of the consciousness. Years later I still eat raw almonds, but if I overeat them, or eat when I don’t need to, it feels quite heavy to my natural light.
Thank you for sharing your experience Dianne, that makes completely sense and it’s very supportive for me now.
I’m recently experiencing some of dairy side effects, after 6 years or so without eating any dairy food and this is something that is revealing me that I need to go deeper in the way I eat. Yes, I eat organic, fair trade, gluten and dairy free, … but I overeat many times, I’m not always cooking or eating lovingly and I need to really feel more what and how I eat, before deciding the menu or taking the spoon to my mouth. Not all tasty-healthy food would support me if that is not what my body needs to or if that is not the moment for me to sit and eat. I definitely need to deepen more into repose before anything else, to not push myself with food, thereby making meal time a space of true nurturing and confirmation, instead of a relief time. I’m sure that these slight but key changes will correct the symptoms I’m feeling in my body.
Thank you Amparo. To respectfully and gently bring this attention to how I shop for, prepare, cook and approach my meals feels inspiring. My body definitely shows me that it makes a difference.
I voluntarily gave up chocolate for 12 years about 30 years ago, and then in the last five years began to add it again because I was encouraged to let go of my rigidity about food and experiment and eat what I enjoyed. So chocolate entered my life again and I had so many different body responses in different situations. In the UK you can buy 100% raw organic, no milk, no sugar, everything free, block of cacao, and various variations of this with 75% raw cacao and coconut sugar. Sometimes it gives me energy without raciness, sometimes it settles my stomach, sometimes I get a slight headache, sometimes I can’t sleep at night, sometimes I have a glorious deep sleep. It seems to be, as you say Diane, how we approach it, with what energy I have aligned to, depending on if we have paused and chosen to connect with ourselves within, observe, feel and choose from that place.
I am working with a Support your Bones site, and evidently 75% to 100% raw cacao helps increase the density of bones. The suggestion is one square of organic raw cacao after a meal once a day. When I approach my square of 100% chocolate with the PURPOSE of building my bones, not from comfort, (in fact it is very difficult to eat more than a square it is so very bitter and dense itself!)) the effect seems to be very different, and I don’t feel impulsed to eat it the next day either, so no addiction. It does feel building to me and I feel I am being loving to my body, so it feels as though that brings about an acceptance in my body.
For others it is different, we are all unique, and our bodies are on the journey of discovering what suits us, and that depends on so many of our food choices, and emotional choices in the past, our illnesses and habits. And changes happen all the time, all we can do is experiment as you did Diane. And I agree about the vegan cheese! It’s the comfort, and then the body suffers.
Thanks Joan for your comment, it’s interesting what you have shared here about intent and how the body responds to that. I remember years ago at a certain point each month before my menstrual cycle began my body would ask for a small piece of dark chocolate, I always went with dairy free because dairy seemed to disrupt my menstrual cycle, and I later read that the cacao had magnesium (and perhaps other nutrients), which my body was specifically looking for at that time each month. An impulse or direct communication from my body was very different to eating chocolate because I needed comfort or couldn’t handle an emotion, etc.
Thanks Joan for what you have shared here, the different reasons why we choose to eat food, and the loving purpose you have found to build your bones.
Exposed – the reward of the feeling in the mouth and ignore the effect on the body something I have been and still can choose depending on my day. We have an amazingly accurate tool/resource in our body and an indicator we can use in choosing the quality of living that is going to keep us feeling vital and energetic. This blog asks for us to reflect on the integrity of what we consume, the products we purchase and the service we bring to others as they all carry ingredients (energetic) that we may not realise are there. Thanks Dianne.
Above all else the greatest ‘ingredient’ in life is energy. We pay special care to the amount of spice or salt we take in but conveniently choose to overlook the quality it’s comes with. Like any addiction there’s a pull towards what’s a familiar taste – so we need to bear this in mind when we start to try to live in a different way. It’s the flavour that hooks us back not the specific act.
Great comment Joseph, we could expand the conversation and your quote here “Like any addiction there’s a pull towards what’s a familiar taste” to it being about an addiction or desire for a familiar energy or vibration experienced within the body from our food choices.
Everything is energy, everything is energy, every-thing is energy first so we are eating energy first and food second. We’re a long way from getting our heads around this fact and to be honest I don’t think we really want to know because then we’ll get called out. All those of us that shop in a rush, cook in a rush and eat in a rush don’t wanna know because it makes it so much easier to carry on as we are and not feel guilty or responsible.
Thanks Alexis, that has really simplified things for me “Everything is energy, everything is energy, every-thing is energy first so we are eating energy first and food second.“
I really love the playfulness and yet deeply scientific (in the true sense of the word) approach that you had to uncovering just how much energy and intention affect everything and how your body consistently told you the truth of what was the quality of energy in the food, as opposed to just the ingredients having a certain effect. I have had similar experiences with going to a restaurant and the food looked great visually, but was completely dead energetically, as if it was artificial or something. This really made me ponder, as the actual ingredients were organic and looked super fresh. But when I stopped and felt into the energy of the whole establishment, it felt damp, repressive, and lacking any vitality, hence directly affecting the end product. There is no separation from physical matter and emotional energy as the physical objects (food in this case) readily absorb this energy like a sponge, as you have demonstrated so astutely here Dianne
It is the energy of any one thing that is ultimately the deciding factor in what it is in truth. The world is full of objects, people and activities that masquerade as being something that they are not but there is no escaping the fact that the energy that produced/is impulsing it/them is either the pure consciousness of God or a bastardised version of the consciousness of God. Either way every-thing and every-one is the by-product of the energy that set them in motion. Ultimately it is the consciousness of God that has set everything in motion but we can and have temporarily jumped ship and plugged ourselves into the bastardised version of His energy. Fools that we are.
Absolutely every-thing has an energetic starting point and therefore every part of the process of getting food on the table contributes towards the energetic quality of the end product.
Dianne your article has reminded me of a chain of cafes that sell incredibly healthy vegan food. The food looks really healthy and delicious but every time I ate it I had the feeling that I was eating something that was dead, even though the salads look very fresh. In the end I had to let my body decide as no amount of ‘reasoning’ worked, my body clearly told me that despite how the food looked or what the ingredients were, that energetically there was something very ‘off’ about the product.
It is interesting your finding but not surprised by the outcomes. I have noticed over the years that when you find a product you often buy in major grocery stores, they will copy the product and sell it cheaper. They know how to copy the more expensive ingredients artificially. Are we eating Frankenstein like food, created in a lab? One only has to look at GM wheat and the control the manufacture has over its production. What is the percentage of food that supposedly modern society consumes what is not altered by science for profit?
Our bodies know the energetic truth of all things, it’s as simple as that and I was going to say that it’s A,B,C for our bodies but it’s not, it’s either A or it’s B. The consciousness of God in it’s purest form or the consciousness of God in it’s mangled reinterpreted form, they’re our only two options.
Dianne I absolutely love that you used your own body as the science experiment, it makes the whole topic so relatable. And what a fascinating topic, you’ve lifted the lid on the energetic consciousness of food, something that humanity has not even begun to do. In fact humanity isn’t prepared to even start to go there, currently the majority of us want to use food as a means of escape and comfort, even those of us that are into the nutrition of food use our preoccupation with nutrition as a means of distracting ourselves either from our own selves or from the energetic truth of what we’re eating or both.
I ❤️ you just saying’! and what you bring here … bringing it back to energy in the most practical way. A great reminder and something that has given I am sure all of us food for thought (pun not intended but happened!).
Loved reading this, Dianne. And this line , “My body had reached the point where it said no to comfort, only yes to nutrition and evolution” makes complete sense to my body who has been trying to communicate it with me by simply putting on weight. I have been through the sugars and migraines and am now eating what would be generally considered healthy foods, yet I’m clearly addicted to comfort and when I eat from that energy, my body doesn’t let go of it as easily and readily as it once had. The body has evolved and I’m having trouble keeping up! It’s awesome to read an honest reflection about the wisdom of our bodies.
There’s a common understanding that homemade is often better than ready made from the shops. This I find to be true as now whenever I do get something ‘ready to eat’ from a shop it feels dead. Whereas if I were to make it at home the difference is so vast the two versions wouldn’t be considered related even if the same ingredients are used.
I suppose it all depends on whose home it’s cooked in. If food is cooked at home by someone who feels resentful that they have to cook ‘night after night’ and don’t give a stuff then it might well be better to eat out from a place where the food is prepared by people that genuinely care.
An awareness and understanding of the energy that is involved in the growing, selling, preparation and consuming food is an ingredient that is never listed on the packaging.
Brilliantly said Mary!
What you have written makes sense to me Dianne and thank you for putting into words what we know is true but don’t always want to admit it to ourselves. I know from past experience that I lied to myself about certain foods or liquids that did not agree with me. Alcohol was a big one I knew it didn’t agree with me but I drank it anyway because it was a convenient way to numb my body from feeling what I didn’t want to feel at the time, thinking incorrectly that my problems were bigger than me or because I couldn’t cope with life I needed a crutch. Alcohol became my crutch in spite of the fact that my body had a reaction to it.
Mary, exercise became my crutch. And in the same way that your body showed you very clearly the alcohol did not agree with it, mine showed me the level of exercise that I was doing didn’t agree with me either. Unfortunately built into the false belief that strenuous exercise is good is the idea that pain reflects a desirable level of exercise, therefore I not only accepted the pain but I actually saw it as a good thing.
Thank you Dianne, your body-based research is always so refreshing, funny and clear; it shows that our body knows, long before science can be bothered to be interested or even research it. Wasn’t that what happened with smoking? People were coughing and not liking or even reacting to cigarette smoke long before science ‘discovered’ the ill effects of tobacco.
Oh brilliant Dianne – I love your experiments here and what you are sharing. For no matter how much we wish to make life about research facts and best practice advice, what we can’t quantify and is always missed out is the energetic factor. That can be how the food is produced, why and how you eat it, in what moment you eat, the level of awareness you have, the time of day, part of the cycle we are in, etc – the list goes on. Thankfully we can rely on our body to calculate all of that, if we just listen to what it has to say.
Awareness is indeed the key, it’s the shoehorn to our evolution in every single area of our lives.