Living A Long,Healthy And Happy Life.

As most of my writing,what I'm sharing now is subjective,but everything is personally observed by me,no scientific value whatsoever,but extracted from real life experiences and no theory involved, maybe this can only be pertaining to the persons that lived these long, healthy,fruitful lives ,but in any case these are merely punctual nutritional and lifestyle choices available to anybody no matter what the particular circumstances may be, and require no changes in anybody's habits. So what got me thinking about these things is Pomegranate.Pomegranate is everywhere nowadays and is promoted by nutritionists as a superfood, almost miraculous fruit and alleged to have great positive results in peoples health.Well as I was growing up back in the seventies when nobody had even heard of this fruit, and of course you would never find it at a supermarket, we had a Pomegranate tree in our house and when the season came we ate a lot of it and shared with a lot of our neighbors' kids who all loved it, my grandfather used to dry the peel and it was great if you had a stomach ache,it would go away as soon as you finishet drinking the tea made with the dryed peel.Another rediscovered fruit we consumed a lot of where Figs,of which we had two varieties,regular white figs, Ithink they were called drop of honey, and brown figs which I believe were mission or missionarie.We also had a grapevine of the concorde grape, this it turns out is currently regarded as the best grape to consume healthwise,and the funny thing is grapes was a fruit my grandmother very rarely bought for us because we had the grapevine at home , so we were always longing for the seedless varieties or the gigantic ones .But anyway as long as there were grapes on the vine we would cut a bowl full wash them in cold water and eat plenty of them.So if pommegranate is what got me started thinking about these nutritional wonder foods what prompted me to put this idea in writing is MATE,

Mate is an infusion, sort of a tea that is massively consumed in southern Brazil, Uruguay,Argentina,Paraguay, and parts of chile,the tea is made with the leaves from a type of holly called Ilex paraguariensis and everybody in these countries has been having it for centuries,now it is found out to be not only rich in all kind of nutrients but also having all sort of medicinal benefits.Meats were a very important part of our diet,with the following caveats we ate a lot of chicken but my grandfather refused to eat or buy any chicken from any slaughterhouse or poultry producer because he said it tasted like fish, this may be because chicken feed is mainly manufactured with fishflour which is made from all the refuse from the fish industry,so we always raised our own poultry, and if there were no chickens apt to be eaten in our coup, my grand mother would buy them from farmers she knew raise them the same way we did.Here I'll make a little sidenote the reason for all this is not that my grandfather was some kind of health freak, it was just because he didn't like the way that "other" chicken tasted.Mainly he didn't like fish,we only had fish about once a month or less, the reason being that in his youth and actually since he was a young boy he had worked in the fish industry they were very poor and had no choice but to eat fish almost every day.Of course there were also plenty of fresh eggs that my grandmother picked every morning.The beef that was eaten at our house , even more so at the time than in the present although most of it still is was free range cattle which is the way the great majority of the cattle in Uruguay is raised,and without all the hormones and antibiotics.As every family in Uruguay we ate beef at least once a day in some fashion.So in essence what I'm trying to say is that my grandparents ate everything in moderation without depriving themselves from anything they liked,with no crazy health diets that are constantly changing , where one month the best thing is grains and you eat only grains, then its fruit, you eat only fruit, then the fad changes to only greens, or fish or raw everything or whatever the latest nutrition and diet book claims is the secret to health and well being but end up being health and well being to the said author's bank account.

Every day we see in the news and the media results of studies that indicate how certain behaviors or diets can prolong our life tremendously only to be disputed later by results from other studies that sometimes indicate the exact opposite is true.That is why I personally believe that humans around the world have demonstrated that nutrition and human behavior works best for each individual people when it is in harmony with the person's environment ,culture,genetic and hereditary traits ,and therefore what is good for people from one region of the world may not be the best for people from another.