At the start of our adventure in food last month, we proposed a hypothesis that “Healthy Food is any food that does you a great deal more good than it does you harm, and that does no harm to the people who grow it and the earth it is grown on.” This month, let’s take a look at the first part of the premise: Healthy Food is any food that does you more good than it does you harm.
The observant reader will note that this statement does not presume that there is any food that can do you only good. Any food, consumed in excess, will harm you. It is said that you can even drown in an overconsumption of water. Hence, the first rule of healthy eating is that of Moderation, as advised by Buddha.
Eating in moderation means that we give up on the 28oz bucket of coffee from Circle K on our way to work. It means that super-sizing—even just king-sizing are no longer part of our lingo, or desires. The typical meal served in some American restaurants would feed a family of four in third world countries for a week! Smaller portions mean more room for dessert (sometimes)!
It means that when the next mealtime comes around you will really enjoy your food because you will be hungry. When we go from one meal to the next without working up an appetite, either through overfilling ourselves at the last meal or through couch potato syndrome, the enjoyment of food is practically lost. It is amazing how good good food tastes when you are hungry.
Eating in moderation means that you can enjoy the foods of the earth in their immense variety and with great pleasure. It allows the eater to be free of slavery to any one delicious food, and to be able to sample the true cornucopia of flavours and scents and textures that distinguish one food from another. Did you know that even though there are thousands of types of edible plants in the world, the food in today’s Western diet comes from fewer than one dozen kinds of plants? Corn, wheat, and rice account for more than 75% of all human grain consumption. That’s a shame when there are other delectable grains, such as amaranth, rye, buckwheat, and quinoa that add variety and interest to any table.
What else is meant by “any food that does you more good than it does you harm?” Generally speaking they are foods that haven’t been tampered with by us humans, except in the most basic ways. In other words, what is known as “whole foods.” These include fruits, vegetables, whole grains, grass fed animal flesh and dairy, and the foods made from these foodstuffs. What most definitely are not included in the list of good foods are processed foods, fast foods, and foods containing chemicals.
Just what sort of chemicals are we talking about? Residues from petrochemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides, heavy metals, and herbicides, as well as residues of antibiotics, organophosphates, and hormones, have been found in much of the food available today. Where you will find one or the other or a combination of these chemicals most commonly is in conventionally, or industrially, grown foods. (Traces of residues have also been found in organically grown and wild caught foods, but the occurrence of chemical residues in these neo-traditionally produced foods tends to be a fraction of that found in industrial foods, when present at all.)
Amongst the factors that dictate how likely it will be that residues will be found in non-industrially produced foods, are the length of time that the production farm has not used any synthetic chemicals, how remote it is from farms that do use chemicals, and the integrity of how the food is handled from farm to table. We will take a much closer look at aspects of both Industrially farmed foods and Neo-traditionally farmed foods in future articles.
If you have got a taste for knowing more about what is in your food, have a look at NaturalNews.com, a website that devotes itself to “Natural Health, Natural Living, Natural News.” It contains some 25,000 plus articles on health and nutrition, the environment, technology, energy, politics, and more.
Thank you for reading about Healthy Food this month. Eat Healthy Food in Moderation, Variety and Purity. See you on the road next month.
Namaste.
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