Nature has provided us with a varied and wonderful supply of food. Within our own area we will find different types of foods. During the year various foods have their time and place. Throughout history, when climate has changed there has been a food supply that differed to other climatic periods. All these foods come pre-packaged, some of them we have found are good for us, others are not, some have parts that we can eat and other parts that we cannot. But when we find something that we can eat, we should eat it as nature has given it to us, whole.
We have gradually gotten sicker and sicker. People go to the doctor and ask for magic pills. Why? Because we want a quick fix so that we can soldier on. But why are so many people sick today? We seem to have a plentiful supply of food and great hygiene standards. But our plentiful supply of food includes massive amounts of processed food. Our great hygiene standards tolerate no microorganisms, eradicating one and all.
Customers in supermarkets often have trolleys full of packets of food and bottled chemicals to clean the house. Rarely do customers have just the ‘real’ foods to purchase, meat, dairy, fruit and veg. Packaged food has been processed in some way, a lot of it has been so processed that it is far removed from the natural ingredients.
When food is heated certain vitamins are lost, enzymes are destroyed and other nutrients are altered. Milk is a classic example of a good food gone bad through processing. So many people are finding that they are lactose intolerant now. But this is a new thing caused by the processing of milk, not by the food itself. In pasteurization the milk is heated, in homogenisation the fat in the milk is split into tiny particles throughout the milk. The heating kills the enzymes that are necessary for the digestion of the milk. Fats globulate, they naturally stick together, when they are dispersed throughout the milk our bodies are struck with a new phenomenon. Processed milk becomes a ‘bad’ food because it uses resources in the body to digest it rather than supplying resources to the body to maintain and grow. Raw milk from a clean grass fed, healthy cow is an excellent food.
Salt is another example of overprocessing and refined mayhem. The resultant sodium chloride lacks all the minute trace minerals that go along with it. Without these the body is thrown into a state of imbalance, too much sodium and not enough trace elements. So all sorts of reactions happen in the body to compensate. Whole sea salt is a great food, however. We do need salt, our bodies have lots of salt in them that needs replacing.
Rice is another food that when stripped of the bran is denatured and an inferior food. Populations that have relied on rice heavily in their diet have become sick when changing from brown rice to white rice. The vitamins in the bran that were scarce in the diet were lost when refining produced white rice.
In fact most foods we eat have been altered dramatically by modern processing methods. Most of these methods have been in place for just a century or less. In the total scheme of things we are loosing many vital nutrients and replacing them with fillers. We are not sick from lack of food, we are sick from eating the wrong foods. Whole foods are best, as natural as possible. There are many people who believe that even meat should be eaten raw so that the nutrition is not lost through cooking. They may be right! Certainly in the end it is nature that has the answers and we should respect the way nature has provided us with food.
