The first thing to understand is that you MUST adopt a healthy eating plan in order to lose body fat, feel great and function at your best. The food choices that you make today will have an immediate and long term impact on your life. If you continuously choose to eat low nutrient, highly processed foods that have been treated with chemicals for flavor and shelf life, your body will suffer.
Millions of you are suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other health related diseases simply because of making poor food choices on a daily basis. Many of you then start taking prescription medications to help alleviate your symptoms. Unfortunately, prescription drugs are not the solution to your problem. A drug is a foreign substance to the human body and with it you have side effects. So now you have a health related disease and side effects from the drugs you are using to help you deal with the life threatening symptoms from the disease. Well for many of you it doesn’t stop there. Why stop at one health related disease lets go for two or three. Now let’s go for two or three medications to help alleviate the symptoms of all of those diseases. You cannot continue to pump your body with drugs to try and cure the diseases that you are creating from making poor food choices. At what point do you say to yourself “Okay SELF, what is it that I am doing in my everyday life to cause all of these health related diseases (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity…)” “Maybe I should make a change so I can enjoy life and get off of all of these prescription drugs”. You have the choice! You can wake up and walk to the park with your grandchildren after a breakfast of oatmeal and blueberries or you can wake up and drive through the fast food window for your value meal breakfast on your way to the pharmacy to pick up your prescription drugs!
I know some of you may think that your body only needs a coffee and your favorite meal to function normally but it actually needs some essential nutrients. The adult body requires the following Essential Nutrients to live and function normally:
2 Essential Fatty Acids: Omega-6 Fatty acid also known as Linoleic Acid
Omega-3 Fatty acid also known as Alpha-Linolenic Acid
21 Minerals– Calcium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Sulphur, Sodium, Chlorine, Magnesium, Silicon, Iron, Fluorine, Zinc, Strontium, Copper, Vanadium, Selenium, Manganese, Iodine, Nickel, Molybdenum, Cobalt, Chromium
13 Vitamins– Vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, C, E, D and K
8 Essential Amino Acids ( 10 for children and 11 for premature infants) – Isoleucine, Leucine, Lysine, Methionine, Phenylalanine, Threonine, Tryptophan, Valine, Histidine (children), Arginine, (Children), Cysteine (premature infants)
A Source of Energy (Carbohydrates are the cleanest source, Fats, Protein)
Water
Oxygen
Light
We have every nutrient available at our finger tips but yet the health of most Americans is worse then people living in third world countries. Unfortunately many people are malnourished or deficient in several essential nutrients due to:
Poor food choices
Lack of fiber in their refined processed food diets
Drug interferences with metabolic processes
Increased requirement due to life-style, environment, athletic performance, genetics, poor digestion, poor absorption, food allergies, intestinal injuries
Imbalances in bowel flora.
I recommend taking a multivitamin to make sure that you are getting your essential nutrients. Choosing to eat organic whole foods will give you the opportunity to receive nutritional benefits from phytonutrients, phytochemicals and combinations of nutrients that are still yet to be discovered. It is the combining of nutrients in one piece of whole food that can create a magic or healing process that cannot be duplicated in a multivitamin or supplement. As people continue to discover that the conventional food that they have been eating is slowly but surely killing them then they will be forced to make a change.
