Recent health almanacs contain a wealth of information on how our diet and nutrition play a major role in our health and wellness. The adage “You are what you eat” is actually quite correct, when applied literally to our physical health. The food items we consume have a profound impact on our chemical make-up, which constitutes our physical matter. When food is consumed in a healthy way, our body chemistry is healthy. When food is consumed in an unhealthy way, our body chemistry is unhealthy. Keeping certain guidelines in mind about our food consumption is very important to our health.
Firstly, it is beneficial to think of food as either medicinal or toxic rather than just being something you put in your mouth. There are very few foods that are neutral in nutrition. Most foods are a mix of good and bad chemical elements, and it is up to us to determine which are the most nutritious and which are the least. It starts by philosophically changing the way we look at food. In order to make food available to earth’s massive human population, we have resorted to creating and eating unnatural, processed foods rather than the ones we have been eating for tens of thousands of years. We also consume addictive things in excess, such as alcohol and fatty foods, which is a form of substance abuse. We must return to a more natural, plant based diet that resembles the one we evolved to consume.
It is also critically important to think about how much of any given substance we consume. Portion control is one of the biggest contributors to obesity, stroke and heart disease in North America. Our portion control problems are severe in schools, restaurants, cafeterias and at home. If you are consuming more calories than you are burning through exercise, you will become overweight. It is not a sustainable way of eating. Rather than eating a small number of over-sized portions in a day, nutritionists are saying it is better to eat approximately six small meals in a day, which more closely resembles how we evolved to eat.