The bulk of your diet should be vegetables and when compared with the Asian diet, our meals are unbalanced in America. We tend to eat a large protein, a small vegetable, and a small starch for our meals. Instead, we should be serving a large vegetable, a small protein, and a small starch. In fact, there is protein and starch in vegetables anyway, so you can eat all the vegetables you want and you should never go hungry. Commercial over-farming has taxed the land of much of its nutrients and not all vegetables are created equal. Try to buy organically grown foods as often as you can. Local farms tend to use more sustainable methods and fewer chemicals than the big industrial farms, plus the vegetables are fresher and do not need to be preserved in transport. As a result, the foods have more nutrients and they contain a lot more life. Food that is full of life will give you life.
Non-organic food is not bad for you; it is just not nearly as good for you. Pesticides and man-made fertilizers are very bad for you. Over the past 50 years, the USDA has noted a decline in the nutritional content of our produce, which should alarm us all. Could it be that we are eating more because our foods do not sufficiently nourish us? We are also losing the diversity of vegetables in the pursuit of commercial farming profits. There are dozens of varieties of broccoli, but the agribusinesses only cultivate one. They are selecting and cultivating crops based on their yield, not on their quality or nutritional content. Genetic modification is altering our foods in ways we do not fully understand, and it is possible that we will lose the original foods as they are replaced by engineered variants.
There is an excellent project called Seed Savers, which is trying to preserve seeds of all the un-altered produce in the world. Without intervention like this, it is possible that our only choices for produce in the future will be genetically modified ones. Please visit SeedSavers and lend support to this important project.
Remember that you are constantly rebuilding your house and just as you would when rebuilding your home, you would naturally use the best materials available. And it is the same when you are rebuilding your body – you need high-quality material and this means organic. Organic, organic, organic. Better yet, grow your own vegetables (without pesticides or man-made fertilizers), and use heirloom seeds.
Cooked vegetables are better than raw. There are raw-food proponents out there who argue that, "Cooking a vegetable destroys all its nutrition." This is not true if that vegetable is cooked correctly. Lightly steaming or sautéing a vegetable does destroy about 10% of the nutrients, but the remaining 90% is then unlocked and available. Everything cold and raw that you put in your stomach has to be heated and cooked internally by you. This takes your body time and energy, and slows your metabolism. Calories, however, are a different concept than energy. The average Chinese person consumes 25-40% more calories per day than the average American. So it is not only the number of calories you eat, but how your body handles them.
We need to get all the energy we can from our food so that we can then be active and burn up all the calories and eliminate the ones we don't need. As we get almost all of our energy from the food we eat, we don't want to spend too much energy processing this food. Otherwise it is like taking out $10 at an ATM and paying a $2 fee for doing so.
At one time there used to be some misinformation circulating about celery, which you may have heard that said celery was a ‘negative food' because it costs more calories to process than it gives you, so you can eat it all day and you'll lose weight. Now, that would be great if it worked that way, but it doesn't. This will impair your digestion and slow your metabolism and is obviously inefficient. What we want is efficient digestion. We want our digestive tract to be like a filter – sending the good material to the tissues and the waste to the tissue paper. We don't want to expend too much time or energy having our bodies cooking that food. So we cook our food outside the body and lighten the load on our digestive tract, thus speeding up our metabolism in the process. The less efficient our digestion is, the more food our bodies will ask for.
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