Questions Regarding Nutrition in the Light of Spiritual Science

In addition to the physical and etheric bodies, humans also have an astral body. Plants do not have this. What helps sunlight to build up plants in such a wonderful way is the etheric body. On the one hand, this is oriented toward matter. Humans could not develop their physical organism if they did not do something that is in a certain sense the opposite of what plants do. Even in the process of breathing, humans do something opposite. Here, humans already go through the opposite process. We can say the same thing about all human nutrition. We can say that nutrition must take place in such a way that everything that is built up in the plant is broken down again in the human being. The process in the human being is a very peculiar one. If only the etheric body built up a physical body, consciousness and soul feeling would never arise. What the etheric body has built up must always be destroyed and broken down again internally. So although the etheric body fights against decay, a gradual decay still occurs. And what causes this decay, what always prevents human beings from being plants, is the astral body.