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Natural remedies for longevity that will save your life – fresh is best
Eat Healthy – Fresh is Best.
In this article Natural remedies for longevity that will save your life – we talk about WHY fresh is best.
We have plenty advice these days to help us make healthy decisions regarding our diet.
Natural remedies for longevity are easily accessible especially if you are interested and motivated for change.
It does not really matter how or what motivated you to seek a healthier way of life, what matters is getting the right advice.
And when you Google information on natural remedies and healthy living there seems to be so many choices it is hard to decipher which way to go.
In this article I want to make it easier for you to make the right choice, for the right reasons and hopefully answer some of the questions you may have regarding, just what is good food.
So let’s get started with a little bit of recent history, the last 60 years to be precise.
When the tide turned
I believe the turn in the tide came around 50 years ago in the early 1970’s when mums joined the work force.
This movement coincided with the advent of the home freezer and women found a new sense of freedom that they had never experienced before.
Now able to buy groceries weekly and freeze entire meals, the “TV dinner” became the symbol of freedom from the kitchen that housewives had been longing for.
Double income families became the norm.
Families became wealthier.
And we became the great consumers we are today.
While our basic standard of living improved with both parents working, our general well-being unfortunately took a dive.
We took to convenience foods in a big way and the supermarket with one stop shopping flourished by helping save us precious time.
Fast food fad followed.
In New Zealand where I live, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken opened on 20 August 1971 (in Auckland’s Royal Oak), followed by Pizza Hut in September 1974, and McDonalds, the first of which opened its doors in Porirua on 7 June 1976.
Easy cheap fast food, the entire family could enjoy.
A destination experience for the family that was fun with enticing playgrounds and kid’s meals with free gifts inside.
And we have never looked back.
Until the lawsuits
McDonalds is known as the whipping boy of the fast food industry.
It may be the biggest and most powerful but not powerful enough to overcome a lawsuit from Stephen Joseph.
“Trans-fats” were the issue.
Research had found “trans-fats” were responsible for the marked increase in heart disease, high cholesterol, cancers, diabetes and other diseases experienced in the western world and the fast food chains were among the biggest contributors.
When McDonalds failed as promised to reduce trans-fats levels in its cooking oil in September 2002 and delayed the change until February 2003.
Stephen Joseph from BanTransFats.com successfully sued.
McDonalds agreed to give 7 million to the American heart association for a campaign to educate the public about trans- fats, and spend 1.5 million to update the public on its progress in finding a trans-fats substitute.
This famous lawsuit served to alert the public about an issue that most people were unaware of.
Health professionals of the time were fixated with reducing fat in the diet because of the sharp rise in health related dis –ease.
Governments were calling for healthier options by manufacturers and to reduce trans-fats in all prepared meals.
But it seems it was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire because as harmful fats were reduced a steady increase in sugar in prepared meals, tinned foods and prepared cereals followed.
And we steadily got fatter.
And then the recession hit .
By 2008 Nestle the leader in the frozen food market had enjoyed more than four decades of supplying the public with their huge range of frozen cuisine.
Then the recession hit the consumers pocket hard.
No longer able to afford such cuisine, cash-strapped consumers started cooking from scratch with more fresh ingredients and saving leftovers for lunch, cutting into sales of frozen meals.
Consumers who were now cooking meals from scratch rapidly discovered they not only saved more money, it tasted so much better and they knew what was going into every meal.
Now they could also avoid the long list of preservatives and salt in frozen dinners which had become a growing concern in the health industry.
Eric Decker, head of the food science department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst exposes a long and menacing number of preservatives, like calcium propionate, sodium tripolyphosphate, potassium sorbate and ascorbic acid.
Early versions of lean cuisine meals averaged 1000 milligrams of sodium, which is 2/3 the recommended daily allowance for an adult.
The sodium levels have been almost halved now and Nestle have pledged to reduce sodium slowly and steadily by a further 10 per cent by 2015.
While Nestle spokesperson Roz O’Hearn said, Nestle frozen foods use “the same quality ingredients our consumers purchase when cooking from scratch”.
Consumers are not convinced and have been reducing consumption of frozen meals on an increasing basis since 2008.
Sales are down by a quarter in the last 5 years according to researcher Mintel.
Today’s consumer is well aware that frozen dinners offer no or little nutritional value, they cost more and are unhealthy no matter how many discounts and competitions are offered with their meals, sales are steadily declining.
“It’s a health and wellness issue, not just an economic one,” said Alexia Howard, an analyst at Sanford C Bernstein. “The category is not coming back no matter how heavily they promote it.”
Some frozen meals however have increased in sales and those that have been successful promote a healthier alternative.
Sixty years ago, Swanson introduced its frozen “TV dinners” and forever changed the family meal.
Sixty years on, today’s consumer has become more informed about the dangers of preservatives in food and informed people look for a healthier alternative, preferring fresh ingredients which they have discovered is cheaper than frozen packaged meals and healthier too.
Can we turn the tide and prevent a miserable future for our children?
Our children will not live as long as us
For the first time in history, mankind is faced with a disturbing future for our children and grandchildren.
It is not good news.
For as fast as medical science is finding cures for many diseases it is not fast enough for our children.
Although we are talking possibly 5 years less life expectancy for our children, we are also talking a less healthy life and a bigger burden on the health system.
“Our children will not live as long as us”.
Fast foods, convenience foods and a more sedentary lifestyle has contributed to our kids becoming obese.
The report, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, says the prevalence and severity of obesity is so great, especially in children, that the associated diseases and complications – Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, cancer, are likely to strike people at younger and younger ages.
The number 1 Eating healthy tip: “Fresh is best forget the rest”.
All we have to do is spread the word and make the changes necessary to stop this from happening.
Today fast food is advertised as healthier than in previous decades by finding healthier cooking fats, reducing salt and the promotion of “healthier choices” allowing the industry to continue to thrive.
And the consumer is now more health savvy.
Thanks to the recession the consumer is more likely to eat more fresh food.
Farmers markets are the emergent choice for many consumers today.
Now able to buy fresh, in season food, grown locally and supporting the local economy.
Consumers are voting with their feet and supporting their home town.
Another blow for fast foods
However recent news making headlines around the world has found processed food can kill good bacteria in the gut. And by doing so destroy the bacteria responsible for weight control.
Tim Spector, a genetic epidemiology professor at King’s College London, decided to run a test with his son, Tom, who is 23 years old, putting him (Tom who volunteered) on a 10-day diet consisting entirely of food from McDonald’s: burgers, chicken nuggets and fries. For hydration, there was Coca Cola. Before the diet, about 3,500 species of bacteria existed in Tom’s gut. During the 10 days he ate McDonald’s, about 1,300 of those species died, and a new type of bacteria became dominant. “The implication is that the McDonald’s diet killed 1,300 of my gut species,” the son said in an interview with the Australian newspaper, PBS News
TIP: After a course of McDonalds follow up with a course of pro-biotics
This revelation could not be timelier.
In the last 60 years the western diet has changed considerably.
We have isolated some of the worst culprits in processed foods and are steadily reducing them.
Recent findings by Tim Spector may help answer the question of rising obesity in our society.
The consumer is becoming aware of the health benefits of eating fresh.
In New Zealand, most primary schools have a vegetable garden and students are learning the art of gardening and the importance of healthy eating.
5+ a day.
The 5+ A Day message was first dream’t up on the fields of California in 1988.
The campaign was compelling: Beginning in the mid and late 1970s, the evidence became quite clear about the role of diet in preventing cancer and heart disease and other conditions.
Various governments around the world eagerly adopted this message.
The evidence and the policy thinking was, that unless we got the population as a whole eating more fruit and vegetables, the enormous burden of diet-related health would carry on.
Adopted in New Zealand in 2007 a charitable was formed to increase the consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables for better health in all New Zealanders.
This message has been adopted in school education and today many kiwi kids are benefiting from its conception.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
The term “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” was first coined by Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) who numbers among the greatest philosophers of all time.
And when we associate this term with healthy eating the message is clear.
The best food to consume is “fresh is best forget the rest”.
I want to impart this message to as many people as I can because although it is an ancient message its verity is even more significant today.
One step further
The problem with supplements
I am a huge fan of vitamin C supplements for a short period of time, for instance when you get a cold or injury.
The problem arises when you look at for example the B complex vitamins: PABA or vitamin Bx
Even though PABA is a component of folic acid, there is no evidence yet that suggests we can make folic acid from it. PABA can be synthesized when favorable conditions exist.
PABA’s status is controversial as it has not been recognized officially as a vitamin, and therefore, not recognized as being essential in the human diet.
And this is where the problem lies with supplements, we recognize most vitamins, minerals and amino acids, but we concede we do not know all components of whole plants, fruits and vegetables. Hence “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.
How about the processing of white flour.
Now we know the process of making white flour strips all vitamins and minerals from the flour and we also know that the stripped vitamins and minerals are replaced before it’s packaged and placed on market shelves.
Do we know for sure that we put everything back that was taken out?
What we do know is that everything that goes back into the flour is every vitamin mineral and amino acid we recognize officially.
I could go on with plenty more examples, but I’m sure you get the point. Our tampering with food has lead us to where we are today looking down a path of obesity and the rise of preventable dis-ease.
Eating for longevity – Fresh is Best
We have absolutely no doubt however that fresh food is the best food. Thousands upon thousands of years of human consumption has proven the case.
In reality our experience of the food we have consumed in the past 60 years in the western world has only proven to escalate deadly disease and premature death.
I don’t know about you but I choose the wisdom of millennium, I choose to make my food from scratch. I like to buy local fresh ingredients supplemented with home grown fruit and vegetables.
In my generation I have learnt eating fresh produce means less risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and other diseases.
Consuming fresh food produced locally also saves the environment by reducing transport costs, storage costs and packaging costs which are all passed on to the consumer.
Fresh is best for our health, our planet, our community and our pocket.
By adopting a philosophy of growing your own fruit and vegetables and buying fresh from local producers we will also reduce packaging, most of which ends up in our landfills and on our beaches.
In New Zealand this equates to over a tonne of waste per household per year.
Landfills affect the environment by releasing powerful greenhouse gases and can leach waste into the soil and water ways, which poses a serious risk to humans and animals.
Nearly 3/4 of this waste could be kept out of landfill by not buying packaged prepared meals and other food goods.
Recycling, Reusing and Reducing will benefit everyone’s future.
I hope you enjoyed this article and make the necessary changes for our children’s future.
