When it comes to your health and diet, you really have two choices – you can chose to go through life without an adequate supply of whole food nutrition, but you must be willing to accept the consequences. On the other hand, if you want to do everything you can to stay well, whole food nutrition is not optional – it’s absolutely imperative. So how do we get it? Well, obviously the first way to do this is to eat more fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, beans, berries, etc – that’s where this nutrition is found – that’s where you can get it. There are 3 problems that we have in today’s modern lifestyle that are causing us a problem in getting enough of this nutrition from our diets. Number one is that we just don’t eat nearly enough servings of fruits and vegetables. For a long time, the recommendation was 5-9 servings a day, with a serving being about the size of one’s fist – obviously it would be a smaller amount for a child. But that recommendation was increased a couple years ago because it became apparent that the produce available to most of us today doesn’t contain as much nutrition as it should because of growing practices – the recommendation now is 9-13 servings a day. That’s a lot of food – it’s difficult for many of us to change our diets to eat those amounts of fruits and vegetables. The other two problems come about because of the rest of the recommendation – the full recommendation is 9-13 servings a day of FRESH, RAW fruits and vegetables - fresh means ripened on the plant and recently harvested. Unless you’re growing your own food, you’re not eating much of that, if any of it. The produce we buy at the store often has been picked green in order to reduce spoilage. Much of the nutrition enters the food as part of the ripening on the plant process; when the food is picked green, it cannot contain nearly as much nutrition. Then we take most of these vegetables and some of our fruits home and cook them – heat damages many nutrients. So the food that we are eating often does not contain as much nutrition in the first place, then we damage more by preparation processes, and then we don’t eat enough of it as the last point.

No more than about 10%-15% of Americans eat at least 5 servings a day. Teenage boys are the worst – less than 1% of them are eating at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. And our children are not immune to this damaging process of oxidative stress, either – if they’re going through their young life without this nutrition, they also are aging faster and the prediction from physicians who look at the trends and the processes say that we’ll be seeing heart attacks in teenagers in America within the next few years – we’ve got to make a change here.

Now, it’s really difficult for most of us to rapidly change our lifestyle and our diet – that is the first recommendation to you – please eat more fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, berries, beans, etc. Don’t smoke. Exercise. Drink more water. Avoid adding a lot of fat to your diet – these fat containing salad dressings, like bleu cheese and ranch and thousand island. Avoid cooking in a lot of fat. Also try to avoid, or minimize, your intake of processed foods, like white flour and white sugar. Minimize your intake of prepackaged foods – the things that always come in a package that have a shelf life; in order to have a shelf life, they have to be acidic – they are adding an extra acid load to the body. That acid load has to be buffered and one of the major buffers, or neutralizers, of the body is calcium. Calcium is pulled from the bone in order to do this, increasing your risk of osteoporosis, then that calcium is lost through the urine, increasing your risk of kidney stones. There are a lot of things you can do to improve your chances of staying healthy, but none of them will be as beneficial or as effective as it could be if there’s not good whole food nutrition supplied as well.