Nutrition as Preventative Medicine
I can guess that most of you already have a fair inkling about how important it is to eat! Where I think things go a little astray is when it comes to your food choices.
Driven by the mass food production industry, we are being led to believe that food in neat little packets, ready made (with added nutrients to replace those lost in the processing), constitute an adequate diet. And who can blame you for thinking that way? The supermarkets are filled with edible substances packaged as “food” and marketing makes it all look fantastic.
However (you knew it was coming!), all those little packets on the large, are not real food. When you pick up a packet and don’t understand half the ingredients and definitely can’t pronounce them there is surely something wrong.
A basic rule of thumb
A basic rule of thumb I use is – If I wouldn’t usually keep an ingredient in my pantry and add it to my home-cooking (since when is Butylated Hydroxyanisole a food anyway?) then why would I buy a product with it in? Another simple guide is the less the ingredients on the list, in the most cases, the better (or more real) the product. It always amazes how some people are quite happy to ingest a whole range of chemical additives and yet if they were asked to swim in a pool of the stuff they would tell you where to go!
In a nutshell
What you put in you get out. We’ve heard it all before but it is true.
Real food provides us with the building blocks for every single cell (of which there is about 37 trillion in the average adult). Healthy cells equal a healthy life. Proper nutrition fuels our cells, keeps them flexible and strong, hydrates them, and helps protect them from unwanted invaders. And because “we are our cells” this is vitally important in preventing future illness.
If we can start to look at our food as medicine, as a way of keeping well, and shutting the door on lethargy, degenerative disease, oxidative stress, and chronic illness, it becomes much easier to add “real foods” in to our diet. Learning which foods offer protection and which foods do us harm is a huge piece of the preventative medicine puzzle.