Some things I learned in my food and nutrition journey over the last couple of years.
Essential Fatty Acids
Most people know about essential amino acids, which human bodies rely of food proteins for, but essential fatty acids are overlooked. Why? First of all “fatty acids” sounds terrible, like something nobody wants, and second of all the public health focus on excess calorie consumption deemphasizes the importance of fats.
Healthy vegetarians are conscious of food choices and vegans even more so.
Protein
Humans need protein for pretty much everything that happens inside, and only some types of plant foods have notable amounts. Anything that’s a seed, botanically speaking, has enough protein to pay attention to. That includes:
According to classical physics, everything is causal. Though classical physics always allowed that spirituality, and possibly some aspect of life, were outside the realm of physics. To the extent those were part of thing, it was pretty much assumed that people had free will. That we could make decisions independent of physics, which was causal, or spiritual forces like good and evil, which were driven by supernatural beings or forces. Sure we were influenced by them, yet we had the ability to make free will decisions, and a thing called free will existed.
A living object is material in an ordered state, which actively maintains its state (at least), and (better yet) is able to rearrange increasing amounts of its environment into something similar to itself, by growth (ok) or replication (best of all).
In detail, it’s an object that is…
significantly more ordered than its environment (maybe not its immediate environment, as a bacterium living inside an animal, but its broader environment, like the environment that animal lives in), and
actively maintains its ordered state (when its order is disrupted, energy is involved in (attempting to) return to its previous state), and
is able to make more of itself or something very similar to itself.