The Destiny of the Body

Chapter VIII

The Universal Choice

The need to exist, the instinct to survive

Engrossed the tense precarious moment's will

And an unseeing desire felt out for food.

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto IV, p. 137)

In this bound thinking's narrow leadership

Tied to the soil, inspired by common things,

Attached to a confined familiar world,

Amid the multitude of her motived plots,

Her changing actors and her million masks,

Life was a play monotonously the same.

(Ibid., p. 150)

We have seen that food constitutes the only source of energy and material replenishment for a living body. But any material substance is not a food; nor for that matter will the simple elemental forms like hydrogen and oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, which build up all so-called foodstuffs, satisfy the body's needs when fed directly to the organism. These must unite beforehand to form complex organic substances to be physiologically valued as foods. The animal organism — and man's body is no exception— requires that "its food be ready-made; it has no power to manufacture food out of the raw chemical elements."¹

What then is 'food', biologically speaking? Food is any complex organic substance capable of yielding free energy on oxidation or fermentation in the living body and/or of contributing building materials for the organism's substantial structure.

As a matter of fact, all forms of life in spite of their enormous diversity, all living cells whether existing as separate unicellular entities or forming part of complex tissues of a bigger multicellular body, require such food in the shape of

(i)energy-producing compounds providing energy for the various life-processes and for daily activity;

(ii)compounds, although by themselves not energy-producers

¹ W. M. Smallwood, Text-Book of Biology.

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but vitally necessary for energy-exchanging metabolic reactions;

(iii)substances to supply fuel for heating purposes in the body;

(iv)structure-producing compounds to be changed into substances needed for the growth of a young body and for the material repair of an adult one:

(v)specific materials that, although essential to a particular species in its vital functioning, must be supplied to it from outside because of its inherited synthetic disability¹; and finally

(vi)materials capable of being converted into a reserve pool in the body upon which the organism may fall back in periods of emergency.

Now a question may be pertinently asked whether a single organic substance taken in sufficient quantity may fulfil all the above needs. So far as the energy-requirements of the body are concerned, the various energy-yielding foodstuffs are no doubt to a great extent interchangeable; 'isodynamic' is the name given by Rubner to this phenomenon of interchangeability. But energy-equivalence is not the only thing demanded by a body for its viability. It requires too its specific structural components and food-constituents with specific roles in the body metabolism that cannot be taken over by other constituents. Thus there must be a provision of more than one nutrient or basic foodstuff in the dietary regimen of an organism. What are these essential categories of food elements ? Do they vary from organism to organism ?

It is an astonishing discovery that the food of all organisms, plants and animals alike, is essentially the same. For whatever be the diversity of foodstuffs that are gulped by different organisms, these are but mixtures in variable proportions of a very small number of chemical groups otherwise termed nutrients or basic alimentary categories.

The six major categories of substances required in the organism's diet are: proteins (or proteids), fats (or lipids), carbohydrates (or glucids), vitamins, mineral salts and water. Let; us have a summary acquaintance with the essential roles that these nutrients play in the total body economy.

Water: Water, being the solvent for all sorts of substances in

¹ We shall discuss in our next chapter what this synthetic disability means in practice and what are its implications for the solution of the problem with which we are dealing in our present dissertation.

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the body and being the medium in which all the vital metabolic processes in a living organism takes place, is indeed the most fundamental of all the ingredients of an organism's diet. It has been estimated that water and water alone forms 78%of a frog's body-weight, 74%of a chicken's, 82%of a codfish's, 67%of a herring's, 97%of a lobster's, 95%of a jelly-fish's, 80%of an earthworm's and 61%of a cockroach's. In the case of mammalian bodies including that of man, the overall percentage is as high as 60, the breakdown figures for different parts being 83%for blood, 80%for the brain, 75% for muscles, 70% for the skin, 30% for bones and 10% for the fat deposit.¹ The essentiality of water to the functioning of bodily life cannot thus be overestimated.

Oxygen: Since, in general and in the last analysis, an organism has to gather energy so vital to its life-processes by the oxidation of the ingested foodstuffs, oxygen is as important as any other nutrient in the proper maintenance of life. Indeed it is the continual process of the intake of oxygen and the release of carbon dioxide formed that we know as respiration.

Proteins: Proteins are highly complex organic compounds consisting of chains of amino acids arranged in a particular order. No life is known without proteins. Indeed, aside from water, the major and most essential constituent of the protoplasm of living cells is protein; proteins are the principal nitrogenous components of all tissues.

Now a continual need for protein in the diet arises from the following reasons:

(i)a young organism requires the growth of its protoplasmic mass;

(ii)an adult body continually loses its vital nitrogen mostly in the form of urea due to an ineluctable wear and tear of its tissues;

(iii)cells in certain parts of the body, such as blood corpuscles, epidermic cells and cells forming the intestinal mucous membrane, constantly degenerate and die out and are ceaselessly replaced by new cells throughout the entire duration of life.

Proteins are the only type of nitrogenous aliment available and are thus indispensable to the organism in the task of renewing exhausted cells and replacing the worn-out tissues of the body.

¹ Adapted from a table on p. 48 of Knut Schmidt-Nielsen's Animal Physiology (1963).

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But apart from fulfilling this double task, proteins play an essential role in the maintenance of acid-base balance, in the production of antibodies and some hormones, and above all in the formation of the vital biocatalysts, enzymes¹, without which all life-processes as we know them on earth would come to a stop.

Fats or lipids: Lipids are non-nitrogenous organic compounds known as fats, waxes, phospholipids, glycolipids and sterols, and are chiefly composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The fats in the dietary regimen are destined to fulfil the following roles:

(i)to serve as sources of energy;

(ii)to provide the body with the indispensable fatty acids like linoleic, linolenic and arachidonic;

(iii)to act, in their irreplaceable function, as the vehicles through which the fat-soluble vitamins like A,D,E and K enter the body;

(iv)to act as an insulating material to provide the body with protection against cold and mechanical shocks from outside.

Mention may also be made of the fact that fats are the only type of food substances that can be stored in bulk in the body for the organism's future use.

Carbohydrates or glucids: Carbohydrates are a second group of non-nitrogenous organic compounds containing the elements carbon, hydrogen and oxygen of which hydrogen and oxygen are combined in proportions as in water; carbohydrates are present in most of the commonly occurring foods and contain monosaccharides or simple sugars such as glucose, disaccharides such as sucrose or cane-sugar, lactose or milk sugar, fructose or fruit sugar, and polysaccharides such as starch, cellulose and glycogen. The chief carbohydrates in human food are of course sugar and starch.

Carbohydrates are principally utilized as sources of energy and heat. About half to two-thirds of man's energy-requirements are met by the oxidation of ingested carbohydrates. Under normal conditions, the whole of our muscular activity is derived at the expense of the energy of the glucids.

Carbohydrates also have a sparing effect on body's proteins. For, if they are in short supply, the organism tends to make up its quota of energy-need by consuming its own vital protein contents, a verily self-destructive process for the creature.

Finally, a complete utilization of fats by the body depends on a

¹ Vide Chapter VII: "Why Material Alimentation?"

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normal carbohydrate metabolism; hence the delectable saying of Hirschfeld: "Fats burn in the fire of the carbohydrates."¹

Mineral salts and trace elements: Very small doses of certain inorganic substances known as mineral elements are essential to the maintenance of good health. It has been evaluated that a normal adult human body contains 1.5% calcium, 1% phosphorous, 0.35% potassium, 0.15% sodium, 0.25% sulphur, 0.15% chlorine and 0.004% iron.² The living matter, both animal and vegetal, contain various mineral salts, some in solution, others not.

The human blood contains sodium chloride in the proportion of 5 to 6% and this concentration is indispensable for the proper functioning of various organs. Sodium carbonate present in the blood helps in the process of transportation of carbon dioxide from the tissues to the lungs. Calcium phosphate is the major constituent of vertebrate bone, while invertebrate bones are chiefly constituted of calcium carbonate. Phosphorous and sulphur are essential ingredients of protoplasmic mass and iron is a necessary constituent of the hæmoglobin of blood.

Apart from these elements and salts, there are certain other trace elements such as iodine, copper, cobalt, zinc, etc., that are required in infinitesimal doses, but essentially required all the same, for the maintenance of the normal functions of many parts of the organism's body. These do not yield energy on oxidation but play essential physiological roles in the integrated body metabolism.

Vitamins: Experiments have shown beyond any shadow of doubt that it is never enough for the body's well-being to make good its output in energy and work and to repair its wear and tear. In other words, a diet balanced in proteins, carbohydrates and fats, also in the essential mineral elements, fails to maintain the organism's health. In order to ensure a proper nutritional equilibrium ("équilibre nutritif"), certain accessory foodstuffs must be added to the creature's diet. These essential accessory substances, termed vitamins by Funk, are needed only in extremely minute quantities, "a few milligrams or a fraction of a milligram per day."³ About fifteen different substances have till this date

¹Quoted by G. Bresse in Morphologie et Physiologie animales (Larousse, 1953), p. 823.

²See the very interesting article "The Metals within Us" by G. D. Ratcliff in the June 1966 issue of The Reader's Digest.

³Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, Animal Physiology, p. 11.

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been recognised as vitamins but the specific requirements for these accessory food factors vary widely from species to species.

Vitamins are not energy-providing compounds nor do they play any appreciable role in the building up of the organism's tissues. The metabolic function of some of the vitamins is well understood but that of some others is not yet so. In at least eight cases so far, vitamins have been recognised as forming parts of important co-enzymes.¹ But whatever that be, it is a well-established fact that without its quota of specific vitamins taken from outside, no organism can grow adequately or function in a viable way.

So here we are: these are the basic needs for all organisms that have developed so far upon earth. And if such are the invariable requirements for all embodied life, how can we possibly expect that a form of life may be elaborated in the future course of evolution that will dispense with this inexorable necessity? Is it then the fate that living bodies must be always on the search for organic aliments, produced of course by other living bodies, and a mutual or chain devouring would for ever remain the only valid process for any earthly manifestation of life? And, since the supply of proteids and lipids, of glucids and vitamins have to come from the only possible source, the substantial stuff of other living beings, must our body too, the body of man who is as yet the summit product of organic evolution and an aspiring candidate to a divine physical existence, remain doomed to play the unavoidable and ignoble role of a rapacious grabber that cannot subsist except by tearing up other living matter?

But the case is not so desperate as it appears on the surface. For a closer scrutiny reveals that it is not so much the carbohydrates and proteins and fats available in other living bodies, that are in demand by a particular body. As a matter of fact except in the limited forms of simple sugars, fatty acids, glycerols and amino acids, no other ingested food-material can enter the milieu intérieur of a body or be utilized by its various cells. Experiments have shown that a glucose solution intravenously administered to a living body is totally absorbed and assimilated by it, whereas a cane sugar solution administered in the same way is rejected in full by the living system and totally excreted in the form of urine.

¹ For co-enzymes, see Chap. VII: "Why Material Alimentation?".

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It is the same case with all other ordinary foodstuffs. Indeed, it is only because a living body requires in the last analysis only a very few simple substances and these substances are not normally available in the external organic realm, Nature had to devise the process of digestion whose essential function is to breakdown and transform, with the help of digestive enzymes, any available ingested material into forms assimilable by the body. Thus, in spite of the fantastic diversity of organic foodstuffs¹ swallowed by different living species, the end-products of digestion are always the same: the ingested fats get transformed into fatty acids and glycerol, the proteins break up and yield their amino acid components, the carbohydrates get converted into glucose, levulose and galactose. It is only the solution of these limited products along with water, mineral salts and vitamins, that is allowed by the body to pass through the lining membrane of the intestine into bloodvessels or lymph spaces and then transported and made available via streams of internal fluids to the cells of the various tissues.

Thus the predatory behaviour of living bodies that we see exhibited everywhere is an accidental global phenomenon not at all binding in the very nature of life but fortuitously imposed on embodied existence by a provisional disability of the organism's body, that can very well admit rectification if only the proper approach is made.

For all the elements like nitrogen and oxygen, carbon and hydrogen are available in the inorganic realm and the source of energy in ample abundance is there in the shining sun. Cannot then the living body manage to synthesize out of these available primary elements all that it requirres for its vital processes? Has not Mother Nature made any attempts so far that may point us the way of approach? Has not embodied life ever struggled in the aeonic march of evolution to emancipate itself from this binding necessity of food intake?

¹ "Some invertebrates can digest substances indigestible to vertebrates. For example, the clothes-moth can digest hair and wool which are completely resistant to vertebrate digestion. Cellulose can be digested by many invertebrates.... The South African honeyguide, a relative of wood-peckers..., is known to eat pure wax as well as honeycomb. Digestion of wax is almost unique in the animal kingdom." (K. Schmidt-Nielsen, op.cit., pp. 7, 9)

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