FOOD FOR THOUGHT

What should you eat? When should you eat? How should you eat? How much should you eat? It's incredible that such simple questions should meet with such a sea of confusing answers. Dieticians, nutritionists, medics, and scientists, seem to have different answers and often conflicting viewpoints. Obviously all can't be correct.

The answers are very simple and common sense can readily provide the answers.

1) The food must be palatable in its natural or living state. This means mostly in a raw condition. Cooking has the history of only a few thousand years. One has suffered much as a result. Experiment after experiment shows that only a living food diet will sustain health at the highest level.

2) The food must contain no harmful or toxic substances. It should not interfere with normal body processes.

3) The food must be easy for digestion and assimilation. It must place no extraordinary digestive burdens upon the body.

4) The food should be ideally alkaline in its metabolic end products. Humans are among a class that require mostly alkaline foods.

5) The food must contain a rather broad range of nutrients and food factors in utilizable form. Most foods in nature are well-rounded in their nutrients, having a rather complete complement of vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, enzymes, and other food factors known and unknown. If we disregard the water content of foods, most of them do not differ significantly in their nutrient content, though all vary. Thus, the objective in the selections of foods is to arrive at those have the highest possible biological value for us. Only fruits, vegetable, nuts, and seeds in sprouted form meet all these criteria. That too in a most admirable way.

In our experience we find that we are as healthy as our digestion, absorption, assimilation, and elimination. The best of foods and most ideally balanced diets are all irrelevant when not utilized. Again, nutrition is not dietetics, which is the food that should be swallowed. Nutrition is the study of how food, once swallowed, makes you work. It describes the activities which start right from swallowing the food to digestion, absorption, assimilation through blood, and carrying on functions at the cell level for reproduction, maintenance and elimination. In other words, life itself. Nutrition is forces at work, not just elements in food. That means other factors such as air, sunshine, activity, sleep, rest, socially productive interaction, and mental poise are equally important for good nutrition. Health and nutrition are synonymous, but without right nutrition, health at both mental and physical levels cannot be achieved.

In today's position there are limitations to what we can do, but there is no limitation to try. Let us start thinking in these terms. In view of these facts, how relevant are reccommended dietry allowances and the measures commonly used to determine the health of humans ? Also bearing in mind that there are yet to be discovered nutrients that can be found only in natural and wholesome foods, can science decide that people can and should be fed only according to what is known to it?

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