Why Food is Medicine
|
Deepek Chopra |
Nutrition plays a major role in maximizing and empowering our health. The field of nutrition, which includes the foods we eat as well as the nutritional supplements we take, is tense with different opinions, skewed research findings, pure and simple marketing hype. For the average consumer, the search for the truth leads to immense frustration. How is one to know what to believe any more? There are some rules of thumb which will help you to differentiate between what will be helpful, simply a waste of money, or worse yet, what will actually cause harm.
A main confusion people have is with the very definition of food and its purpose. They think of it as "something you eat to get pleasure, to reward and treat yourself with." But in no dictionary I could find this definition. Check out the following definition from the Macmillan Dictionary:
The purpose of eating is to provide the raw materials the body needs in order to function, repair, and rebuild it. According to this definition, a lot of people are living on something other than food. Most people view food as pleasure, but the problem is that food that gives you pleasure eventually will turn to pain. We need to think before we put something in mouth. Instead we think what is my body in the mood for? When we are tired, bored, sad and stressed, we have tendency eat something that gives us a pleasure for a moment not nourishment, but later we will pay consequences. The healthy foods will give you way much pleasure of being energetic, healthy and well-being then being tired, in pain, and sad eating junk food. It is a very short time for pleasure, but there is no comparison how much pleasure good health can give you.
To carry on the life process, each of the 80 to 100 trillion cells must digest food, excrete wastes, and repair itself. We all tend to see our bodies as “frozen sculptures: - solid, fixed- when in truth they are constantly changing: for instance, your fat cell exchange every three weeks, stomach linings every five days, your skin is new in five weeks, your skeleton is entirely new every three month, red blood cell - 2-3 months.
Every minute of every day the body is undergoing change.
Cells are dying off and the body is building new ones - at the rate of about 24 billion cells per day. Hopefully, 24 billion cells are re-made every day. These cells make up glands, organs, the skeleton, nerves, brain, muscles, and ligaments - everything in the body. This is part of the body's normal and natural regenerative function. What happens when cells don’t regenerate at the same rate as they naturally die? If one day the body is short 100,000 cells out of this 24 billion, is it going to function okay? Yes it will. But what if that happens every day?
The body needs certain raw materials to make these cells on a daily basis - vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, fats (yes, we need fats), protein, enzymes, carbohydrates and water. If raw materials aren’t present, the body will either not make the cell, or will make cell which lacks the vitality and structural integrity. This is called disease.
Degeneration occurs when the body is breaking down cells faster than it's regenerating them. All diseases begin with a nutrition deficiency. If the thyroid can't utilize iodine, it can't do its job. If there's no zinc, the body can't make hydrochloric acid, if tissue calcium levels are low; the muscle becomes spastic.
The body is a self-regenerating, self-functioning and self-repairing mechanism. If you give the body what it needs the body will function precisely as designed, which includes healing most anything that goes wrong.
It never ceases to amaze me how we as individuals are always looking for the silver bullet, the fast fix, instant gratification, and in doing so overlook the obvious.
Our bodies are phenomenal, intricate, complex instruments for which only Mother Nature has the blueprints. We know some of the basics and are learning more each year, concerning the function of body parts, and how we are put together.
One obvious, glaring fact is that we cannot continue to abuse and over use the body and expect it to function at a premium, 100% level all of the time. If you don't make time for a healthy lifestyle, then you need to plan and schedule time to be sick.
Depletion of the nutritional value of our foods started with WWII. With food in short supply, the issue of losing flour to rancidity and bugs became a major concern. In the wisdom of the food industry, if you could eliminate the oil, you would eliminate the rancidity issues. If you could eliminate the bugs in food - in the case of flour, the wheat germ and the bran, you would eliminate the bugs. Sounds logical, doesn't it? The wheat was then bleached to give it a cleaner look. Soon, "white wheat" became the rich-man’s food. The beautiful, soft, pure white substance became somewhat of a delicacy only the wealthy could afford.
Then, came the age of industrialization. If this could be mass-marketed, more people could afford it! They could, and their original tactic of controlling product loss worked. The bugs left it alone. What amuses me is the fact that the bugs are smarter than we are! They knew that there wasn't enough nutrition left in the flour to support their own nutritional needs, so they left it for better sources. Yet somehow we grew to believe that we could survive on it. If there wasn't enough nutrition in flour for a bug to survive, how could we?
Mass production began to sweep the nation. We got busy. Processed foods became easy. We could buy "Hamburger Helper" and just add our fresh ground beef. We had T.V. dinners. Fast food restraints became popular. In the beginning, it was just a once in a while "treat". Soon it became the norm. In the 80's we quickened it by microwave ovens. And now, we can buy meat that never spoils and everything is hydrogenated!
Somewhere along the line, we started noticing a rise in heart disease and obesity. We blamed fat. We created man's answer - margarine, the spread that stayed soft, even in the refrigerator and didn't melt if you left it out. The problem was we were plasticizing our cells. Today we know that margarine has contributed to 40% more heart disease than butter ever did!
So what else have we done? Processed sugar to death, and now replaced it with an artificial sweetener. Replaced water with sodas, replaced whole fresh fruits and vegetables with canned, boxed and packaged counterfeits. As a result, we are a malnourished, obese society!
I know people who are over nourished (fat), under nourished (skinny), totally out of physical condition (can't walk around the block without being out of breath), depressed, high cholesterol, low energy, high blood pressure, hyperglycemic, the list goes on and on, and they all have the same question: what herb, vitamin, mineral, mixture, lotion, remedy, cure, drug, or what should I be eating, in order to get better? However, if our bodies are out of balance, clogged up, stressed out, reacting to drug side effects, then chances are we will not see the results we desire.
Johann von Goethe