health2u.co.za

When we want to eat healthy, most people are a little bit confused. In this short article, I’ll look at the basic outlines on how to know whether what you have on your table is healthy or not.

Myths in the marketplace:
When you walk into a restaurant or coffee shop, there is a ‘healthy’ section on the menu. But mostly this healthy section is the normal unhealthy food, with only one or two healthy ingredients, such as added fibre or no sugar. Take for example the well-known health muffin. That is in most cases a chocolate cake with a little more fibre that usual and maybe some raisins.

The better option is to order some salad. If you do, avoid the salad dressing that comes with it. This way you be the safest you could get at any public eatery.

Some experts also believe that health bars is only candy bars in camouflage.

That explains why you’re eating all these ‘health foods’, but still are constantly tired or can’t lose that weight.

When you want to quickly buy your lunch on your way to work, stop at the fresh produce shop. Grab yourself a fruit or a ready made salad and keep it in a cool place till lunch time.

Best are the types of food you buy fresh and do most of the preparations yourself. I know it takes time, but it well worth while.

The broadest guideline I could give is to buy whole, fresh and as natural as possible. Let me expand on this:

Fresh:
This term is well known. The freshest you could get is to pick fruit or vegetables from your own garden for tonight’s meal. In the time between harvesting and eating the fruit and vegetables, some nutrients get lost. If you know when it was harvested its better than when you don’t know. Who knows whether that fruit was stored for more than a week already? These days it’s very easy to deliver fresh produce any where in the world in a couple of days, but it still happens that it get stored for a long time.

Whole Food:
This means that the food is not processed. As soon as some utensil or machinery is used, the food is no longer whole. Wheat and cane sugar is the classic examples. It goes through various levels of refinery, each with their own uses. In the process from wheat to white flower, a lot of nutrients get lost, for example vitamin E, some good fatty acids and fibre. Cane sugar goes from the cane to molasses, to brown sugar to white sugar. In each step we lose nutrients. Or just think what the possible losses from apples to apple juice are.

Canned food falls into the same category. It’s peeled, cut, cooked and full of chemical preservatives before it goes into the can.

Natural Food:
Getting it as natural as possible is what we want. Every time someone uses chemicals or some piece of equipment between harvesting time and the table, the food loses some nutritional value. Fertilizers, pesticides, growth hormones, feeding lot animals, farmed fish, pasteurization of milk, preservatives, food processors, microwave ovens, genetically modified cultivars and so forth are all taking away from the natural state of food.

When we go shopping, we don’t know what happened to this shine red tomato on the shelve, before it got there. When we want to buy a bottle of milk, we don’t know what that cow was fed and what chemicals are still in the milk.

The best way to be sure is to buy fruit and vegetables that are certified organic and dairy products that are organically fed, free range animals. This means that the pastures where these animals graze is also organic pastures where no chemicals were used. When it comes to fish, look for wild caught fish. Lastly choose free range, grass fed beef and lamb.

The nutritional value in these natural foods is far superior to the foodstuff with which humans tampered. And the possible health risk is far smaller.

Remember, we vote daily with our wallets. Vote for natural food.


[Note: When you need help to fit natural food into your daily program, make use of the personal wellness coaching. In this coaching we’ll design a health program for you personally, to fit your preferences and circumstances.]