So it's time to get to know a new formula and commit it to memory:
H = N/C
Health is defined by the amount of nutrients we consume divided by how many calories we eat. So someone can be eating the same amount of calories every day, but one is healthy and the other isn't. It doesn't take long to realize that the healthy person is the one who is eating food with actual nutrients in them vs. the sick person who is not eating any nutrient-dense food or very little of it. This is a simple problem that can be easily corrected. How to do this?
He says to eat foods with an abundance of micronutrients and phytochemicals. Or put simply, eat unrefined plant-based foods, which are whole grains, beans/legumes, fruits, nuts and seeds (not too many nuts if you're trying to lose weight) but most importantly, eat vegetables. As he says, "Salad is the main dish." Every other food should be considered a side to complement your main meal: a big-ass salad, loaded to the brim with fresh fruits and vegetables.
Why should we do this? Because it is only recently being discovered that these foods actually contain disease-fighting nutrients that are not in animal-based foods, and you certainly aren't going to find them in processed foods. So let's stay in the produce section of the grocery store, shall we?
Meat, eggs, milk, butter, cheese, refined white flour, and sugar all lack these non-essential disease-fighting, cancer-fighting, diabetes-preventing agents, and yet these are the foods that most of us eat. In fact, we make them 95% of our diet! I say "non-essential" because these nutrients are not necessary for our survival as opposed to the essential amino acids, but these "non-essential" nutrients are essential to fight many if not all of the diseases caused by the SAD diet. That is right: if you are not aware of it, what we eat can kill us. It's high-time we made this connection--thankfully, with all the info on the internet these days, many of us are beginning to see this relationship:
Good food = HEALTH. Bad food = DISEASE.
But if the equation is so simple, why do we continue to ignore it, even though millions of us are now dying each year because we don't honor this simple rule? Heart disease, Cancer, and Health care are killing us, and they are all related, but when are we going to start paying attention to the causal relationship?
Emma Mustich's fascinating article on salon.com might help answer this question. It is worth a read.
Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy
