CoachThe dismantling yields the nutrients — the small, blood-ready components:
- sugars (glucose above all, Proposition 49.1’s fuel), from starchy and sweet foods;
- the small units of building matter, from meat, fish, eggs, dairy and pulses — the bricks of Proposition 18.1’s construction;
- the units of fats — dense fuel and building material both;
- plus passengers needing no dismantling: vitamins, mineral salts, and water itself.
The food families of Definition 18.3 are, at bottom, suppliers of these nutrient families — the shopping list behind the shopping list.
Examples
Example 50.5 (One lunch, itemized)
The balanced lunch of Example 18.4, re-read as nutrients: pasta — starch, dismantled to glucose by the litre; fish — building matter, cut to its units; the oil on the beans — fat units; beans and apple — vitamins, minerals, water, plus fibre. Fibre, note, is the exception that proves the system: no juice of ours can cut it, so it crosses nothing and travels on — the leftovers’ bulk (Proposition 25.5), doing its own useful sweeping.
Example 50.7 (The specification again)
Large, thin, moist, blood-lined: the villi meet exactly Proposition 47.1’s specification — for nutrients instead of oxygen. Lungs’ pockets, gills’ feathers, intestine’s villi: wherever the body must move much across a border, it builds the same machine. Spot the specification once, and you recognize it everywhere.