Fitness, Food, And More, Part 6: Fresh Food
Fresh whole raw organic food is delightful. Fresh, whole, raw, organically grown, toxin-free, in season, local, sun-ripe, mostly plant-based food is nature’s health mandate for humans. Eat mostly that way to have the longest and healthiest physical existence.
Since the beginning, all creatures have eaten fresh and fermented whole, raw, organic foods in accordance with life’s mandate. All except humans and the creatures we feed still eat their foods that way. Usurping nature’s mandate, we create ‘better living through chemistry’, processing and cooking, and feed unnatural, ‘toxified’ junk foods to pets and other animals. Both they and we suffer health breakdowns as we replace living whole raw foods with less beneficial options including cooked, fried and processed.
Do you eat fresh, whole, raw, organic foods that are healthy, or do you still eat processed and fried dead foods? Dead foods kill health. They dissipate your health and body prematurely. Eating nutritious, raw, energizing, flavorful, fresh whole foods makes you dynamic.
The research is now clear and convincing. Optimum health and longevity occur when you eat mostly plant-based whole foods and take a vitamin B12 supplement. It is that simple. Doing so, you also decrease your carbon footprint. Globally, the animals we raise for food require about six times more energy and water than plants, and burn up about five times more oxygen than all 8 billion people.
Processing removes and damages nutrients and may add toxins. It changes food quality from their fresh, whole, raw, organic high-energy state to a low-energy, abused and dead state. Vote for health with your wallet. Care about what you put in your mouth. The symphony of flavors, textures, colors and fragrances of plant-based whole foods is out-of-this-world. Eat nature in its living form.
Greens, Good Oils and Proteins
Where greens don’t grow, people can’t live. Much of the time, early hunters came home without meat. Then the family ate plants because they don’t run away, don’t fight back and are easy to hunt down and kill. Greens are your most important health-supporting foods.
Greens make almost everything you need. They store sunshine energy. You get both your internal food energy and your external heat and industrial energy from them. They dissolve and take up minerals from soil, and make them absorbable for you. They manufacture the essential vitamins, amino acids, proteins, fatty acids, fats and oils you need. Greens create the natural medicines in herbs and spices. They make protective antioxidants, phytonutrients and gene-modulators for you. They hold water in the soil and moderate weather and climate. Raw plants supply protective probiotic bacteria and provide fibers (prebiotics) that are food for probiotics. The enzymes they contain help your digestion. Plants also make the oxygen you breathe. Plants make materials for your clothing and shelter. They need you for nothing. You need them for everything. Respect, revere and eat plants.
Eat good oils. They provide stable, performance raising, extended energy. They calm your craving and addiction to mood flipping, insulin-spiking, life-shortening refined sugars and starches. They beautify your skin, raise your thinking capacity, and keep your cells, organs and systems healthy.
Avoid heat-damaged and fried oils, as well as frying and fried foods like the plague. All fried oils rob you. They lower your energy level, inflame you and raise your risk of cancer. Inflamed, you have more pain, and you’ll more likely support thieves of health: diabetes, dementia, heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, arthritis.
Fresh, Whole Foods
Eat fresh whole, mostly plant-based foods including fresh, unroasted, unsalted seeds and nuts. You’ll never be short of protein unless you’re a bodybuilder taking steroids. A cow makes steaks and milk out of grass. Horses, elephants, rabbits and gorillas are made entirely out of grass and leaves, plus water and oxygen. The occasional worm or insect on their plant-based foods makes them not perfectly vegan, but close. The idea that you have to eat eggs, meat, dairy or fish to get enough protein is largely based on the ads of the industries that sell you these products.
In India, 300 million Hindus belong to the Brahmin caste. Obligate vegetarians, they eat a tablespoon of soured milk with each meal, to get probiotics and vitamin B12. They eat no flesh. Fish, fowl, red meat and eggs are off the menu. Whole plant-based foods have enough protein for Brahmin requirements (the warrior caste does eat flesh).
Limit fruits, lower carbs. Carbohydrate-rich foods like potatoes, grains and corn, and the baked ‘goods’, pasta, fried foods and chips made from them, as well as desserts, soft drinks and sweets are unnatural. They cause swings in your insulin, blood sugar and mood, and make you addicted, overweight, obese, diabetic, heart-diseased and short-lived.
Beans, lentils, and chickpeas can be good food for some people. Some fruit is good, but nature consists of much more greens than fruit. Ratio? In nature, the ratio of greens to fruit is 10+: 1. In my experience, that’s a healthy ratio of greens to fruit for humans.
If you're coming to this blog post first, you may want to check out the whole series, starting with this article. In the seventh and final installment in this series, I'll share what you need to know about essential nutrients.
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