Evolution has equipped us with a triage mechanism (from the French verb 'trier' meaning to sort out): When there is a deficiency of micronutrients in our bodies, they are reserved for short-term survival and reproduction at the expense of disabling DNA repair, which increases the risk of developing chronic disease in the long-term.
" Anytime we do not have enough micronutrients, we are paying a price in long-term DNA damage. If we want maximum life span, our micronutrient needs must be met throughout life. The 'triage theory' provides a unifying rationale for a causal link between chronic, modest deficiency of a micronutrient and the many degenerative diseases accompanying aging, such as cancer, immune dysfunction, cognitive decline, cardiovascular disease and strokes. The triage theory predicts that optimizing intake of the roughly 40 essential micronutrients will reduce the risk of chronic diseases associated with aging and increase lifespan. If the theory is correct, incidences of these diseases might be reduced by an inexpensive intervention with micronutrients (1, 2). The triage theory posits that during evolution, as a result of periods of shortage of micronutrients required by various proteins for function, nature selects organisms capable of rebalancing their metabolism. This rebalancing ensures survival of the organism at the expense of a healthy metabolic state, which results in accumulation of insidious damage leading to longer-term consequences mentioned above including chronic diseases of aging. That nature may have developed such a system is logically consistent with the consensus that natural selection favors short-term survival for reproduction over long-term health. There is, for example, a known triage between organs: If you are short of iron, the body takes it out of the liver before the heart, because if iron is taken from the heart, the body will die. And one of the long-term consequences is DNA damage, which is relatively unimportant when one is starving but can result in cancer after a delay of 20 years. Over the millions of years of evolutionary time up till now, micronutrient shortages were likely to be very common, for example, the 15 essential minerals are not distributed evenly on the earth; dietary sources and availability also fluctuated…