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May 27, 2009
There are many areas within our lifestyle choices that impact our health: whether or not we choose to exercise regularly, how much water we choose to drink each day, the quality and quantity of how we choose to sleep, how we choose to manage and alleviate the stress in our lives, etc.
Of all of these choices, one tends to stand out more than the others. This of course, is the lifestyle choice of what we eat. This is definitely one area where the rubber meets the road. What we eat is not necessarily more important those other areas, however our daily food choices have profound implications to our present and future health that cannot be ignored or glossed over with statements such as ‘Everything in moderation’ or ‘I eat pretty healthy for the most part’.
When it comes to making any lifestyle change, including dietary changes, the first principle is to add positive things or behaviors first. Rather than beginning a new nutritional regimen by trying to stop eating all the bad foods you enjoy and feeling deprived of your morning soda or candy snack (that you may be literally addicted to), it’s better to start by adding a good breakfast, eating large salads at lunch and dinner, and bringing fresh fruit and raw nuts as snacks; you will find that your cravings for the bad junk foods (think of them as “disease foods” or “die-fast foods”) will decrease. Let’s start with the concept of whole foods.
Why Whole Foods?
Our first priority, the one thing our bodies crave and require, is whole, fresh foods. Whole foods are nutritious and health-promoting – everything else is not. It’s really that straight forward. Anything else is either denial, rationalizing, or an outright lie.
Whole foods are what we are genetically designed to eat – meaning what’s found in nature, not what is created in laboratories or mass food-producing factories. Fresh whole foods are what will create health for you, enable you to lose weight, have energy, sleep better, not get cancer, not have a heart attack … the list goes on and on. Today most of our supermarket foods and convenience foods are simply a concoction of stripped down ‘food’ devoid of nutrients combined with man-made chemicals and manufacturing processes that have no resemblance to what one would find out in nature, to what we are genetically designed to eat.
A loose definition of whole foods is foods that are eaten in as close to the way it’s found in nature as possible, with minimal to no processing. There are obvious variances and limitations to these criteria depending on the food. For example, foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds can and should be eaten in their raw state, which provides the highest level of nutrients (i.e. fiber, phytonutrients, antioxidants, enzymes, water, etc.). When those foods are canned, baked, fried, salted, etc. and/or prepared with other processed foods (e.g. an apple that is made into a ‘turnover’ made with white flour, hydrogenated oil and high fructose corn syrup) they are moving away from the way it is found in nature and in the process, losing the majority if not all of its nutritive value and now has disease-promoting additive chemicals. For example, in the apple turnover, the once naturally found food, the healthy apple, has now crossed the line from being simply non-nutritious to actually becoming a disease-producing food (the white flour, hydrogenated oil and high fructose corn syrup are major contributors to the development of diabetes; the hydrogenated oil is a known causal agent for heart disease and cancer).
On the contrary, other foods such as olive oil, almond milk, and whole grains, by necessity, are eaten after a some degree of processing – if you were to eat an olive straight off an olive tree, you would quickly regret it – you won’t get the taste out of your mouth for days. Then there are differing degrees to that processing. For example, a cold-pressed virgin (first press) olive oil is a much better food than heat-processed oil; fresh made almond milk versus store bought almond milk differs greatly in their ingredients and nutritional make up (but almond milk is still health-promoting versus cow’s milk which is disease-promoting).
Wellness Recipes - Healthy Food For Your Family:
PS. Send me your favorite recipes and I’ll add them to our collection. contact@drkratka.com
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