It is generally accepted that there are several main areas affecting good health. These are:
- Nutrition
- Hydration
- Stress
- Sleep
- Exercise
- Activity
- Mobility
- Toxins
- Sunshine
Most of us will do well in some areas and less well in others. Let’s begin to explore what these are, starting with food.
Nutrition
Firstly, you are what you eat eats. So always look at how your meat/fish lived and what it was fed on (GMO’s, antibiotics, gluten based crops etc.) and how your vegetables were grown and if and to what extent they were sprayed with herbicides and pesticides. Our body needs nourishment to function optimally. We require vitamins, minerals, and essential oils to keep us healthy.
We face the challenge in today’s world of mass production in finding foods that are phytonutrient rich (we look at phytonutrients in my next blog). The Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed nearly 2,500 years ago: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” But how do we do this when today’s crops have a significantly lower nutrient value than in the past? Today’s food produces 10 to 25 percent less iron, zinc, protein, calcium, vitamin C, and other nutrients1.
Avoid GMOs
I will cover this in more detail in a later blog. You want to avoid genetically modified foods. These crops are increasingly sprayed with Roundup, which contains glyphosate, which studies have shown is carcinogenic. Unlike other pesticides and herbicides, Glyphosate is absorbed by the plant and so you can’t wash it off.
Whereas in the USA genetically modified foods are on the increase with 86 percent of corn and 94 percent of all soy being genetically modified and the large food companies fighting open and honest labelling of foods.
In Switzerland GMOs have been banned at least until 20173. While some GMOs get imported into the country, Switzerland has strict standards and requires labelling. The Coop has a policy of not selling any product that contains GMOs.
My suggestion is nevertheless to keep to organic foods, which have not been sprayed with pesticides and herbicides, which have been linked to a wide range of human health hazards4.
The chart below will hep you be aware of some of the foods that are heavily sprayed with harmful pesticides and herbicides and some which aren’t. I suggest you take The Dirty Dozen and The Clean Fifteen shopping list with you. So you don’t need to buy organic avocadoes, but apples ideally should be organic. How to wash vegetables and fruit to reduce the pesticide level will form part of a later blog.
Also, did you know Organic food may have as much as 20 percent higher nutritional content for some minerals, and 30 percent more antioxidants on average1?
- http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5339
- http://nomadcapitalist.com/2013/06/25/the-best-countries-to-live-abroad-and-gmo-free-no-genetically-modified-food/
- http://www.gmo-free-regions.org/gmo-free-regions/switzerland.html
- http://www.toxicsaction.org/problems-and-solutions/pesticides
