There is some evidence that people who get a lot of their daily calories from a variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts etc. have a significantly lower risk of dying young from cancer or heart disease than do people who get a lot of theirs from foods that are more starchy (wheat, rice, potato) and less fresh/more processed (pasta, french fries, soda pop etc). Explaining these findings has led to much speculation and discussion, which can be quite illuminating, but I like to think about Stoffwechsel.
This German word fascinates me. In one word, admittedly a compound though not especially so for German, it refers to a spectacular complex of processes that together accomplish the mind-bending goal of replacing (wechseln) the material (stoff) of your body.
I don’t know much biology or biochem so my understanding of Stoffwechsel is not remotely precise. I have the kind of gauzy glimmering of a technical understanding that allows the imagination to run wild, like in the techno-bafflegab of science fiction or audiophillia, or like when the indeterminacy revealed by quantum physics allows you to form a theory of the material basis of free will in human consciousness (I’m not the only sucker fooled by that story).
In short, Stoffwechsel is a powerfully evocative word for me.
So, allowing some of that wild-running imagination, and bearing in mind the bewildering valency of our bodies’ defense and repair systems, I think about Stoffwechsel as I contemplate the difference between two real or hypothetical meals. For lunch I might have carrots and humus or alternatively potato chips and Coca-Cola. Both are delicious and meet my immediate need, which is to get through the afternoon doing what I gotta do. One meal has far superior shelf-life and hence greater convenience and lower cost (or higher profit or a bit of both). The other requires either refrigeration or a garden with the ripe ingredients, a suitably stocked larder, and laborious preparation. But from the Stoffwechsel point of view, one provides, I choose to imagine, more of what’s needed to make those defense systems work at high performance, and to clean up those plaques left behind in nerves by the invading hoards of SARS-CoV-2, or to dismantle a precancerous growth before it loses its prefix, or to just replace my materials, the crumbling bricks and timbers of my structure. You know, Stoffwechsel!