What to Eat for a Balanced and Vibrant Life
In the quest for a healthier lifestyle, one question often looms large – “What should I eat for a vibrant life?” Nourishing our bodies with the right foods is key to achieving optimal health and well-being. The choices we make at mealtime can significantly impact our energy levels, immune function, and overall vitality. Join us on a journey to explore the essential elements of a balanced diet, uncovering the power of wholesome nutrition to transform your life.
Nutrition is a crucial requirement for human health. It makes so much sense. And there is an abundance of evidence supporting the scientific link between optimal nutrition and optimal health. Every gardener and farmer knows that feeding the soil properly will make a huge difference in the vitality of the plants from the soil.
Animals Eat Their Native Diet
Feeding animals in modern agriculture is a highly refined science, since there is no profit in sick animals as there is in sick humans. Nutrition scientists have created carefully crafted formulas for optimal health in chickens, pigs, cows, and other domestic animals. The scientists create pellets that have all the necessary macro and micronutrients so that the animal cannot spit out their peas. At the 1800-acre Wild Animal Park in San Diego where 2 million visitors per year view the 2600 animals on display, several scientists are employed to mimic the diet of the animals in the wild. If you deviate from the native indigenous diet of the animal, it will get sick
Dental Health and Nutrition: Eat for a Vibrant Life and Smile
Weston Price, DDS, was a dentist who began practicing around 1900. By 1930, Dr. Price noticed the dramatic deterioration in the oral health of his patients, with dental caries, crowded dentition (requiring wisdom teeth extraction), and periodontal disease. While most dentists would have been satisfied with that observation, Dr. Price asked the question “Does diet have anything to do with this deterioration in dental health?” Price and his wife, a nurse, travelled the world during the great depression, visiting 12 cultures on 5 continents and taking 15,000 photographs along with meticulous notes.
Eat Unprocessed Foods for a Vibrant Life
Dr. Price observed that people within the same culture and same village eating different diets, one adhering to the native unprocessed diet and the other person embracing processed foods of white flour, sugar, and oils would develop dramatic differences in their jaw appearance as well as dental, physical, and mental health. Price’s 1939 book, NUTRITION AND PHYSICAL DEGENERATION, was one of the earliest works documenting the health costs of deviating from our native indigenous diet.
Price found that processed foods created enormous problems in dental, physical and mental health. On average Price found less that 1% of teeth in people following their native unprocessed diet were affected by dental caries. In similar people eating refined foods there was a 30-40% incidence of decay in teeth.
Americans spend $111 billion per year on dental work, with about $4 billion of that spent on dental implants. There are 15 million root canals performed annually in the US with blatant questions regarding the long term health impact of these root canals. While a huge issue in political campaigns revolves around “who is going to pay for my health care bills?”, no one has asked for free dental work along with national medicare.
There are thousands of legitimate scientific studies in peer reviewed journals supporting the efficacy and safety of nutrition for healing, only the few negative studies are reported in the mainstream media. Big Pharma spends $6 billion advertising drugs to the public and another $20 billion schmoozing docs. Your TV station will not promote nutrition supplements as a solution for health problems when their primary source of income is drug company TV ads.
What Should I Eat for a Vibrant Life?
One of the problems in proving the efficacy of nutritional medicine is the tenacity of humans. Humans are hard to kill. You might need to smoke for 40 years before lung cancer crops up. You might eat poorly for decades before a serious illness is diagnosed. Humans are built to survive. But we can only thrive, live longer, delay, reverse or prevent disease by employing optimal nutrition.
Hippocrates is considered the founder of modern medicine 2400 years ago. Hippocrates was a nutritionist and herbalist. The Hippocratic oath “first do no harm” taken by modern medical doctors includes the following passage:
“I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing.”
Prevent Disease by Eating for a Vibrant Life
Of the $38 billion annual budget at the National Institutes of Health, allegedly $1.5 billion is spent on nutrition research. The vast majority of government funding for science goes to research that will eventually produce a patentable FDA approved drug. We study ways to palliate the symptoms of illness, but rarely ways to maintain health or prevent disease, especially through the obvious modality of nutrition.
The link between nutrition and health is blatantly seen in pregnancy. Mother and baby suffer if nutritional status is poor. Which is why Vitamin Angels delivers prenatal nutrition supplements to 70 million mothers and children in 70 countries around the world. You never get a second chance to make a baby. Nutrition deficiencies can make the difference in having a child that is healthy and bright, or has some birth defect or is mentally retarded.
Using Evidence-Based Nutrition
The data on “evidence based” nutrition science is staggering. Alan Gaby, MD is a physician and biochemical nutritionist whose 40 years of clinical practice combined with 15,000 peer reviewed references makes up his tome NUTRITIONAL MEDICINE.
Melvyn Werbach, MD has compiled a separate review of the world’s literature on using nutrition supplements and foods to prevent and reverse many common ailments in NUTRITIONAL INFLUENCES ON ILLNESS. Sheldon Hendler, MD, PhD has authored the PHYSICIANS DESK REFERENCE OF NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS.
Michael Murray, ND and Joseph Pizzorno, ND have authored ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NATURAL MEDICINE, another fine reference book for this field. Life Extension has compiled a 3800 page massive textbook DISEASE PREVENTION AND TREATMENT which uses largely nutrition protocols to reverse 131 common ailments. We could go on.
There is overwhelming evidence showing that nutrition protocols are logical, humane, scientific and need to be included as front-line therapy. In truth, few medical schools teach any nutrition, and most of the 900,000 medical doctors in American are highly ignorant or sarcastic of nutrition therapies. Many a good doctor has lost his/her medical license or been chased out of a state by a fiercely protective medical board seeking “standard of care”, read: drugs and surgery.
The Power of Zucchini Nutrition: Health Benefits and Nutritional Value
What Should I Eat?
Without health nothing else matters. Our health bill is huge and unsustainable. With current trends in diabetes, obesity, cancer, kidney disease, heart disease, mental illness, Alzheimer’s disease etc., we will soon be at a breaking point, even with an unlimited checking account. We must begin to use rational therapies, which starts with nutrition as the fulcrum for lifestyle changes. Nutrition as front line therapy is evidence-based, efficient, economical, humane, and irreplaceable. Nutrition is true 21st century medicine.
Excerpt from
12 Keys to a Healthier Cancer Patient, by Dr. Patrick Quillin, PhD,RD,CNS
