Food - We Are What We Eat

Nutrient Dense Food is Essential

Nutrient dense foods include:

• seeds
• vegetables
• fruits
• grains
• nuts
• fish
• uncooked oil extracts of all the foregoing
• organ meats
• eggs

Foods that are not nutrient dense typically include:

• Processed grain products, white flour products (cakes, pastries, noodles), white-rice, etc.
• Sugary foods such as ice cream, soda pop, syrups, etc.
• Skinned vegetables such as skinned carrots, skinned potatoes, etc.

Nutritionally empty or extremely calorie rich foods are vacuum foods. We call them vacuum foods because they suck the nutrients out of whomever eats such foods. They do this because it takes more expenditure of stored body nutrients to digest, assimilate and convert foods into energy and cellular repair nutrient tools than the foods provide.

Remember this principle:

Processing foods into energy and nutrient tools destroys existing nutrients and energy within the body. If a food provides less nutrient tools than it destroys, then that food is ‘killing us’.

So, if, for example, the process of digesting and assimilating a food destroys 10 units of nutrients while supplying only 5 units of nutrients, then that food has caused a net loss of nutrients (-10 + 5 = -5).

Variety of Nutrients is Also Essential

Routinely eating the exact same foods day after day can lead to nutrient deficiencies. That is because each type of food contains a particular subset of all the nutrients that our bodies could use. What is missing in one particular food may very well exist in another food.

Therefore, we should eat a variety of food. By eating a wide variety of food that we are more likely to supply our body with all the nutrient tools our body needs.

So, be open to trying new foods whenever the opportunity presents itself. Don’t be narrow-minded in terms of foods that you will eat. Try sardines, yoghurts, organ meats. Tell your taste buds that what is good for you is what you choose to “like”.

The Best Foods

1. Berries and seeds (especially sprouted) rate at the top of the list
2. Leafy vegetables in all their varieties come next
3. Then legumes (but, they have to be cooked correctly)
4. All other low calorie vegetables
5. A small amount of wild harvested, ocean fish (the smaller fish, such as sardines, are the best)
6. Grains
7. Fruits
8. Squashes, potatoes, yams, corn and other high calorie vegetables
9. Eggs
10. Organ meats
11. Muscle meats
12. ... processed, canned, bottled, packaged foods are virtually always going to be at the bottom of the list because most of their nutrients have been killed, but they still have their calories, and therefore are vacuum foods. Exceptions to this rule are foods like E7, that are packaged in a way that the foods are undamaged.

Enzyme Rich Foods are Important

Whenever we eat foods that do not contain within themselves the enzymes necessary to help digest the foods eaten, then are body must provide the enzymes from its own stores of enzymes. The body has a finite capacity to manufacture enzymes. Therefore, eating foods devoid of enzymes hastens our demise.

Two options are available to stall the depletion of enzymes from our body.

1. Eat foods that contains enzymes - essentially, this means raw foods since the enzymes in foods are quickly killed by cooking.
    
2. Utilize enzyme supplements whenever you eat cooked or processed foods so that you do not deplete your body’s stores of enzymes.

The Seeds of Our Death are in the Food We Choose to Eat

Eating food, and converting it into useable energy, takes a toll on our bodies that eventually causes our death. This toll is due to the need to create enzymes to digest our foods and it is due to the mitochondrial activity of processing food into calories. These are in addition to the toll created by loss of nutrients due to vacuum foods.
These tolls on our bodies reduce our potential life span.

The most difficult to avoid of these tolls is the toll on our mitochondria caused by processing our food into energy.

This is an inescapable toll. The more food being processed the more damage that will occur. High glycemic foods are the worst. Eating them is like revving up your car engine needlessly. You get nothing but unnecessary wear and tear on your car.

Free radical creation in the mitochondria is an unavoidable consequence of the action of creating energy out of food. No matter how well we supply ourselves with mitochondrial antioxidants, not all the free radicals that are created will be safely neutralized. Inevitably, there will be some damage to our mitochondria and to cell membranes and even DNA.

Mitochondrial wear and tear is just like the wear and tear that results from using any kind of machine. Eventually, it will wear out. And, the more you use it the faster it will wear out.

Therefore, we always want to make sure that the food we eat is worth the free radical damage that occurs inside our mitochondrial engines. Either the pleasure the nutrient tools gained by eating a food needs to be worth the free radical damage that results.

That is why we believe that consistently eating nutrient dense food, selected from a wide variety of food is the wisest course of action.

Sometimes, this requires retraining our taste buds. As a wise person once said, “wisdom is choosing to like the foods that are best for us.”

Our taste buds are indeed programmable. Bush children in Africa learn to like beetles and grubs. American children learn to like hot dogs. Indian children learn to like curry. Asian children learn to like spicy foods. Virtually all of these are learned responses, not inherent. Often these learned responses are due to the atmosphere or sociality involved when eating. That means we can learn to serve up nutritious foods at our parties and soon our taste buds will be reprogrammed.

We Discard Much of the Nutrition in Food by not Chewing Enough

Many nutrients are locked inside food never to be released unless...

we release the locked up nutrients from their cellular prisons by the mechanical action of masticating and mixing the food with the enzymes contained in our saliva.

An interesting fact that has come out of the concentration camps of World War II is that prisoners who would chew their food thoroughly (actually beyond thoroughly, until there was only a watery mash left)... would survive while those who wolfed their food down would die. They had the same incoming calories and nutrients, but by chewing and chewing and chewing, they were able to “obtain” much more of the potential nutrition in the foods.

So, take time with your food. Chew it, imagine that you are releasing the nutrients by doing so, and that the power of the food is being transferred to you. For, that is what in reality is happening.