What is a healthy diet?
Are you confused? What is a healthy diet?
Is
butter better or perhaps the low fat spread that you saw advertised
in the newspaper and on the television, is better? There are
hundreds of advertisements each and every day that we are bombarded
with telling us that low fat is this, or high sugar is that.
I believe that what we eat affects how we feel, I am not alone in this, there are many who feel the same way. Over the years I have been fortunate to meet many of them and one thing sticks in my mind, my dear Grandfather saying to me "I am going to eat butter not that ghastly scrape that comes in a tub in the supermarket." Grampa died over ten years ago but he was very wise, so here's to butter!
I also feel that what works for one person is not necessarily going to work for someone else.
A great way to start is avoiding processed foods and this "Ingredients to Avoid" card can assist you when out food shopping:
Joanna's top ten tips food tips:
- Avoid sugar
- Don't drink diet drinks or sodas
- Make Sauerkraut... eat with every meal
- Avoid trans fats & hydrogenated vegetable oils
- Chew your food, sit at a table when eating
- ENJOY your food
- Coffee... if you want to drink coffee, drink a single expresso... it has less caffeine!
- Eat vegetables every day
- If you can't pronounce the ingredients on the box don't eat it. Don't eat food in a box!
- For fast food, boil an egg!
Good food is not a fad diet, it is not a quick fix. Good food nourishes us and is worth eating.
Dr Weston A Price was a dentist and wrote a great book, that if you can get a copy, I urge you to read. He studied traditional people all over the world and specifically looked at the correlation between their diet and the health of their teeth. He looked at their bone structure as well and noticed that they all had nice wide jaws and looked healthy, Weston Price noticed that there was an absense of tooth decay and the people had a healthy outlook on life. Joyous, one might say.
Compare that to today, the rates of tooth decay in children is rising at alarming rates, be that in the UK, US or Canada, that is likely related to our diet.
'Nourishing our Children' is a great non-profit campaign of the Weston A. Price Foundation, which educates about how a return to a more traditional diet, moving away from the Standard American Diet food pyramid can improve our health and wellness. Nourishing our Children says, of its work, "..established to address the dramatic deterioration in the health of our children. This decline is evidenced by the rise in child obesity, dental deformities such as crooked teeth, learning disabilities, behaviour problems and chronic diseases such as asthma, allergies and diabetes."
The Nourishing our Children food pyramid is somewhat different to the one we were taught in school. This pyramid is created by Sandrine Hahn, copyright 2009
Sally Fallon Morrell founder of the Weston A Price foundation, talks eloquently about the correlation between food and wellness. This short film explains more about real food.
It may seem so simple but if we eat simple traditional foods then we gain the nutrients we need, I know that I feel far better eating more beneficial fats, such as coconut oil and grass fed ghee or butter. I also make (as I ate as a child and teenager) bone stocks, from grass fed beef and chickens.
Sometimes lunch is literally a cup of heated stock (in a pan) into which I chop up an onion, tomato and clove of garlic and that is more than enough to fill me up and nourish me for the afternoon.
©Actual Organics 2009