Our Food Supply

Our food supply is very important because it can promote good health, which makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t make a lot of dollars.  Does that have anything to do with the fact that heart disease and cancer are the top two annual killers in the US?

It is generally accepted that “You are what you eat”.  If that’s the case, let’s consider what we eat.  To do that, we need to first consider the soil that nourishes the plants we eat or our food supply.

According to Scientific American, “...fruits and vegetables grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today. The main culprit in this disturbing nutritional trend is soil depletion: Modern intensive agricultural methods have stripped increasing amounts of nutrients from the soil in which the food we eat grows. Sadly, each successive generation of fast-growing, pest-resistant carrot is truly less good for you than the one before.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss

This Can't Be Good News!

When the soil is deficient, the plants are also deficient and weakened; they lose their defenses. Insects and diseases come and attack them.

And so we fertilize the soil to “replenish” it.  Fertilizer is made up primarily of three minerals, nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium.  The problem is the soil requires about 52 different minerals.  So where are all the calcium, magnesium, and manganese, and zinc and iron and all the other minerals?

So, what’s the farmer to do?  He goes to the chemical companies and says “My plants are dying!  What can I do?”

And the chemical companies are more than happy to sell him all kinds of pesticides and herbicides and fungicides and growth stimulants and other chemicals to add to the soil.

Then What?

The result?  Our plants are deficient in nutrients and the quality of our food supply diminishes.  These nutrient-deficient plants are fed to our animals and to humans as food.

And then, we cook it!  Food contains live enzymes that help with the body’s digestive processes.

When many foods are cooked, the body reacts to them as a toxin.  The body goes through a process called leukocytosis, where it starts generating white cell activity to deal with the ingested cooked foods.  That means the food structure has been changed into a form that the body does not recognize, so it is treated as a toxin.  Something we do not want our bodies to do to the food we want to be nourishing to us.

Paul Kouchakoff, M.D. was the first to show that if you eat a diet that is more than 51% cooked food, your body would react to the food as if it were being invaded by a foreign organism.

He was also the first to demonstrate that if 51% of your meals were raw, you would have no leukocytosis, or no white blood cell reaction, so your immune system would not be activated with a “false alarm”.   

Thanks to Food Matters and Mark Bittman (food journalist, author and columnist for The New York Times.

Maybe another reason to consider becoming a vegetarian?

Related Articles:

• Healthy Eating Guidelines for Seniors
• Healthy Lifestyle Tips for Seniors

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