Three Easy Steps To A Longer, Healthier And Happier Life
	Step Two: Eat Right <  Previous Contents Next  >

The right diet is not just a balanced one — meat, carbohydrates, veggies and fruits — but the serious inclusion of natural food supplements from rare super herbs and other natural sources. These supplements are the best promoters of a long, healthy life, especially in these days of fakes and second-rate commercial items. Moreover, a balanced diet is not just having a balance on a variety of foods. It is primarily having a balance between macronutrients and micronutrients.

First, let us talk about right nutrition. So how nutritious, do you think, is the food that you eat today? Are you sure the “fresh” veggies, fruits, fish, bread, and meat you eat are indeed fresh? Do you know how they were grown and handled?

Right diet begins from the very root. When you really dig deep into it, you might be shocked to know that nowadays, “nutritious” foods are just figments of the imagination of unscrupulous sellers and TV commercial producers. There is almost no such thing as “100% nutritious” food anymore. If you intend on living a long and healthy life, you have to know the following facts.

SO WHERE HAVE ALL THE NUTRIENTS GONE?

When your body receives right and REAL nutrition, it becomes self-sustaining and self-supporting. It has the ability to produce its own natural vitamins and resistance forces, or disease fighters, known as antibodies. If you feed your body with REAL food, you will minimize the occurrence of diseases in your body systems. Your cells will reproduce healthy cells that will reproduce healthier ones, and so on.

The body tissues will be able to repair themselves quickly and the immune system will always be in tiptop shape.

Why do we have such dreaded life-threatening diseases today that were unheard of in earlier times? One of the oldest and authoritative books on life, the Bible, records people living to almost a thousand years—with no illnesses whatsoever. Even from the days of our grandfathers and great grandfathers, we hear stories of amazing physical feats of health and longevity. People from “those days” live incredibly simple but very happy lives, the kind that many of us today would like to go back to.

What happened to all these?

Consider the following reasons and know what caused them:

Let us start from the very beginning. It all begins from food existing as a seed until it grows and bears fruit. The onslaught of soil depletion and erosion reduces the nutrients that plants get from the soil. Plant crops can only be as nutritious as the soil is rich in nutrients. Bad soil cannot equate to good crops. Over the years, especially when global commercialism intensified, the field of agriculture was pressured to produce not only for the nation but also for the world.

The race to feed the world (exporting of agricultural crops) introduced the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to hasten production. The soil was poisoned and eventually made impotent. The abuse did not stop there, however. The huge crop production must continue, so even the soil was “pressured” and forced to produce against its will, so to speak. Commercialism even pressures nature, not just humans!

Hence, agricultural crops are no longer as nutritious as they used to be. You have to eat bowlfuls of vegetables today just to equal the nutrients that a small bowl of veggies produced a long time ago. So don’t be so sure of your health just because you eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. The question is, “How nutritious are they today?”

Global commercialism also results to forest denudation (rampant cutting of mature trees, balding the mountain coverings), which further results to large-scale floods until today. Rural floods wash away precious soil down rivers. The soil, with the fertilizers and pesticides included, clogs the rivers and kills nutritious fresh water animals as well.

Soil left to itself has the natural ability to recycle its potency; meaning, when the nutrients of the top soil is used, it can be refreshed by deriving potency from the upturned lower soil.

Traditional farming (which uses NO chemicals) helps in this. This natural process retains potency for the top soil. However, with man’s destructive intervention, like the wholesale introduction of chemical or inorganic fertilizers (which become deadlier with technological advances), plus deforestation, the natural soil process is disturbed. Instead of letting the soil rehabilitate to retain natural nutrients, it is forced to produce through unnatural means.

This results to crops with greatly reduced nutrients.

Aside from having their nutrients greatly reduced, many foods today are treated with harmful chemicals. Washing, cooking, and boiling for long hours may lessen the chemicals in your foods, although these harmful substances may not be fully eliminated. Peeling the skin off some fruits will not ensure safety either. Imagine swallowing and accumulating all those fertilizers and pesticides in your body. Do you still wonder why deadly diseases today were unheard of in the days of our ancestors?

Insects know better. They will not touch crops with pesticides. That is why you will find these crops sold in the market without any sign of insect bites. People buy them because they look clean and delicious. They don’t know that these outward appearances conceal inner hazards. Some people think it is a good option to eat fruits and vegetables that have a few nibbles from insects.

After having your veggies and fruits treated with fertilizers and pesticides (and these are given to farm animals as part of feeds), they also undergo artificial processing to prolong their “freshness.” They are treated with preservatives, which mean more chemicals. Some instant noodles are added with chemical wax, which may be cancer causing. Do you know that other countries ban some of these noodles? Moreover, many processed foods are abundant in salt.

Because they terribly lack REAL nutrition, their sellers sometimes put synthetic vitamins in them and pass them off as “plus factors” for good health — when actually, these synthetic vitamins often do either nothing or even harm your health.

If you want to live a long, happy, and healthy life, always be on the lookout for the presence of preservatives in your food. See the labels and find out if some of the ingredients can be harmful to your health.

Eating meat in itself is unhealthy especially when eaten too much. Certain meats, such as beef, take some 72 hours to digest completely. Therefore, if you eat meat each meal, you would still be digesting the food you had for breakfast the other day while you are again consuming another round of it.

Now, imagine how unhealthy it becomes if the animal where the meat came from was treated with antibiotics and other artificial health sustainers? These chemicals stay in the meat fibers; and no amount of washing, cooking, or boiling will get rid of them.

Hence, many people today are immune to antibiotics for humans. They ingest the antibiotics from animals, and the extra strong antibiotics kill both the good and bad bacteria in the human body. The more you eat chemically treated meat, the more you weaken your body’s defense mechanisms. This hazard is aggravated further when the meats are processed with artificial tastes and preservatives.

If you want to live a long, happy, and healthy life, minimize your meat intake. Substitute meat with healthier alternatives like bean curd.

Many “fresh” fishes in the market today are added with preservatives to lock in their “freshness.” Some use formalin, a chemical used in embalming human corpses, to preserve newly caught fishes. A few wicked sellers may wash marketed fishes with food coloring or textile color to give these fishes a “fresh” look. To ensure your safety and enjoy the nutritious benefits of fishes, buy them from trusted sources only.

Many white breads are hard to digest. Their hard residues stay long and may form blockades in the intestine. Moreover, experts say eating white bread actually accumulates sugar in your body. Health enthusiasts say wheat bread is a healthier alternative for white bread, but many of the wheat breads today still have preservatives because they are commercially produced. Always check the ingredients just to be sure.