The Dark Matter of Nutrition · why your liver is overbuilt

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The thousands of plant chemicals in food that no nutrition label lists are mostly processed in the body by cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes in the liver and gut wall, a system that exists to handle foreign molecules (Guengerich 2008). One visible consequence is that food and drugs affect each other: furanocoumarins in grapefruit inhibit CYP3A4 in the gut, so some drugs cleared by that enzyme reach higher levels in the blood (Bailey 2013). People taking such drugs should ask a doctor or pharmacist before eating grapefruit.

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What the nutrition label leaves out

EVIDENCEREVIEW 2

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Not one of the molecules that make garlic garlic appears on the nutrition facts panel.

That panel was not drawn up at random. To see why it looks the way it does, start with a question about the body: what earns a molecule the name essential?

Essential is the gap between two rates

The answer is not in the food. It is in you, and it is two rates you can measure:

how fast you make ithow fast you use it up
If you make it faster than you use it, you don't need it from your meals. If you make it more slowly than you use it, the gap has to be filled by eating. If your rate of making is zero while your need is not, it is essential: cut off the supply and your body's store falls at the rate you use it, until below a certain line, the step that depends on it stops.

Look closely at the shape of this sieve. The condition for getting onto the panel is that its absence goes wrong within weeks to months.

Such a sieve is bound to miss a whole class of molecules. Being absent from the panel does not mean being absent from food, and still less does it mean doing nothing in your body.

The nutrition label is a shadow cast by acute deficiency disease.

Educational content, not medical advice — consult a clinician.

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