Healthy Living and Eating

Living Healthy, Eating Properly and Living Longer! We have hundreds of books, articles, blogs, etc. available to us on the subject of living healthy and eating properly. However looking at the statistics in North America we cannot detect anything that would indicate that anyone is actually heeding the advice. Granted, some of the info out there is complicated and confusing, but some of it contains good and useful info,some of it has too much and lots of useless info, and some of it is outright wrong and could be harmful. Like everything today, we must be able to sort out the good and useful information and discard and disregard the others. First I would like to state here: we would hardly need a doctor or medications. Look at wild animals as an example, there are hardly any sick ones out there! WHY? well, they live and EAT HEALTHILY! For the most part we do not, in our modern world, have much influence over our environment like contamination, pollution etc., and nobody could come and suggest that living in a big city is becoming to our health. Other than moving to a pristine location there are other things we can control to help us live healthier. REDUCE STRESS: now here we can actually learn to cope better, train ourselves to be more patient, exercise, yoga to mention a few. then comes FOOD and DRINK, all the stuff that we put into our bodies! Let us use some logic here: The way we eat and what we eat has changed very drastically in the last few thousand years. BUT folks, our body and digestive system did not change. We all know about evolution and adaptation ( Darwin) and it takes many thousands of generations to 'accomplish' any changes, works well for insects and other critters with short lifespans, but our bodies and the digestive system did not have enough time to adopt to our modern ways of eating. We are stuck with a body and a digestive system that is thousands of years behind our modern eating habits and we are better off if we start catering to the system we actually have! So let us try to imagine what our ancestors a few thousand years ago ate and how they ate. Originally all they had was wild fruits and something we could regard as vegetables. If we ate only fruits and vegetables RAW, we would get sick a lot less, and let us not kid ourselves, we actually can, and some of us do and have less health problems. Eventually grains got added, and then meat. But all was consumed raw until we learned to manage fire, and...it went downhill from there, most enlightened nutritionists today will say: "the worst thing that happened to food was cooking". Now, let's look at the way HOW they did eat that stuff: When they had berry season in one area (for example), everybody ate berries, every day for weeks or more sometimes. Now, that is easy for a digestive system to cope with, like our stomach needs to produce only very specific digestive "juices", enzymes etc. When they had a kill of some animal, they were eating meat, sometimes for days, again, very specific digestive "items". But they did not have hors d'euvres and/or soups first, then meat and carbohydrates together, and then something else all together for desert, they did not mix all sorts of different food stuffs as we do today in a normal meal. And that is a part of our problem, the mixing or combining of foods. WE ARE MAKING THE WRONG COMBINATIONS! Let us assume for a moment that we are not vegans or vegetarians, and that we do eat meat. Ok, it is the meat we should eat first, just the meat by itself, definitely without carbohydrates, so our stomach can "focus" and get all the right and specific digestive juices ready, especially Hydrochloric Acid. Meat is one of the most difficult, from our stomach's point of view, one of the most labor intensive foods to digest. The carbohydrates need to be eaten separately, at least 35 to 45 minutes later. We can however, combine proteins and carbohydrates with raw fruit or vegetables, we call this "life food" and it comes complete with its own digestive enzymes. Easy to see that vegetarians are in many ways better of. So very important: EAT YOUR FOODS IN THE RIGHT SEQUENCE AND THE RIGHT COMBINATION! It is obvious that organic foods are preferred, even though some changes to the US government's regulations as to what can be called ORGANIC partially eliminates our possibility to rely on labels, best to know some producers. It is a known fact that the average person in North America eats too much, especially too much at one time. Eat small meals more often, six times a day is good, snacks are best from fruits, nuts etc. The foods to stay away from of course are all the prepared meals, the processed stuff, read labels and buy food without or at least with a minimum of chemicals. The worst food stuffs are simple carbohydrates; they, together with low fiber intake, are the main cause of the diabetes epidemic we are currently witnessing. The other big problem are soft drinks especially the ones that contain artificial sweeteners (low or no sugar) very health threatening. In future articles we shall look at some of these items in more detail. Summary 1) live in the healthiest environment you can 2) learn to cope and deal with stress 3) eat little often 4) eat proteins and carbohydrates separately 5) combine only with raw life foods 6) stay away from simple carbohydrates 7) stay away from soft drinks, especially the ones with artificial sweeteners.