Eat well, be healthy

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Contemplating what to have for your New Year’s resolution?  How about adopting a new way of eating that will slow signs of aging, help prevent cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue syndrome, MS, you name it!

This is what Dr. Weston Price found when he went around the world in the 1940's looking at the diets of the last indigenous people left in the world because they had no tooth decay and no degenerative diseases (like cancer).  If you want to learn more, here is a web page   http://www.westonaprice.org

All studies today show the same thing as Dr. Weston Price found when studying indigenous people.  Eating a low carb, organic diet with lots of leafy greens, multi colored veggies and natural fats is the best diet in the world for slowing signs of aging, avoiding cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue syndrome, MS, you name it.  Get rid of processed foods and anything with sugar added is a great step in the right direction for your health and how you feel and look.

Eat food grown the way God intended, without chemicals, with great soil (to get your vitamins and minerals), and absolutely no GMO’s (Genetically Modified Organisms).  To know for sure this is how it is grown, grow it yourself or buy from a farmer you have visited and trust.  Join a CSA (to find one near you, visit http://www.localharvest.org).  Local and organic at the store is the next best thing.  Difference between organic and all natural?

With a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), you pay the farmer before the growing season starts so she can buy all her seeds and supplies she needs.  Then, when she starts harvesting in May/June, you get a share of what is harvested each week through October.  If you calculate how much you are spending on produce each week, it is likely more than you are now.  What we found is that our overall grocery bill went down dramatically as we planned all our meals around the produce we were getting each week.  A CSA is a great deal as well as motivator to eat really well!

You can grow most of what you eat in small spaces and pots.  You don’t need much room.  It is amazing how much you can grow in a small amount of space.  How to decide what to plant for small spaces?  It doesn’t take more time than grocery shopping or eating out to grow your own.  Seeds are cheap (you can even get them for free from friends, neighbors or the veggies and fruits you get from the store).  You can make containers out of almost anything, too.  A 6’ by 6’ plot, planted right, will grow most of what you need for produce for most of the year.  This small of an area will grow $700 worth of produce if only doing a traditional 2 season garden.  Mediterranean diet garden  Stretch it to a 4 season garden and the benefit goes up.  You can garden year round in small space

Eat "as close to the root as possible".  As soon as you pick a vegetable, it begins to die.  Some vegetables lose 90% of their nutritional value in a week, about the time it takes for produce to be picked, washed, packaged, shipped across the country and put on the store shelf.  Cooking also destroys the enzymes in food.  The most nutritious will be that which is just picked, grown in soil that is rich in organic matter and minerals. Fresh is best!  To increase the minerals in you, increase them in your garden soil. The next step in garden production and your nutrition-soil minerals   

Here is what "organic" means in raising and growing food Basics of organic gardening  If you want to go a step further, What is biodynamic farming?   Permaculture-companion planting on steroids   Biodynamic and permaculture promote a closed loop system where no outside inputs are used.  You do things like make your own fertilizer.   When choosing seeds and plants to buy, this blog explains the different terms of heirloom, hybrid, and GMO  What do the terms GMO, natural, heirloom, organic, hybrid really mean?

Truly, God created the heavens, the earth and all living plants and creatures perfectly.  He created the plants and animals to sustain us and give us everything we need.  We should remember that and eat a variety of foods that are as close to its natural, fresh state as possible to feed our bodies the perfect nutrition.