Clutter In Our Life, Part 5

Clutter #5 - Food Choices

Part 5 of 10

In our lives, we clutter our bodies with very poor food choices. Before you start thinking and trying to convince me that you are the healthiest eating human alive, consider how many aisles in the store are for absolutely healthy eating and how many are questionable to say the least. If you don't know, take a trip to any local grocery store and you'll quickly see what I am talking about. Of course, you might be one of the rare people who do eat healthy and if so, I applaud you for it.

We as humans tend to fill our shopping carts up with the processed stuff and we rush past the produce section of whole vegetables and fruits. We pay little attention to the ingredients in the food we buy including such things as amounts of sugar, salt, high fructose corn syrup, additives and preservatives among other things.

We think that frozen vegetables and processed foods are just as healthy as the natural stuff but of course, we are only kidding ourselves.

There is much we should pay attention to in the food we buy and what we eat. The more conscious we are of this, the more healthy our body will be in the long term. What we put in our body is what fuels us through our day so if we put garbage in, we get garbage out.

Come back tomorrow for part 6 of this series, Clutter In Our Life. Below are the various parts to this series that you can read as well.

Clutter In Our Life Series
- Introduction
Part 1: Spending our hours watching TV news
Part 2: Keeping Ourselves Constantly Busy
Part 3: Numbing Ourselves
Part 4: Following Blindly
Part 5: Food Choices
Part 6: Health care, Doctors, and Medicine
Part 7: Hydrating Our Bodies
Part 8: Thinking We Have The Answers
Part 9: Exercise Is For Another Day
Part 10: We Fail To Evolve
- The 30 Day Challenge


Blog Post & Images (c) 3/20/11 Don Shetterly - use by permission only
http://www.donshetterly.com

Eat Healthy, Live Longer!

While surfing the internet news sites, I came across an article that links to aralifestyle.com . First thing you should know is that this is a site who's articles are sponsored by their advertisers. They state this in their "about us" page.

While they are free to do this, you have to take what is printed on their pages with some care. I can in no way validate the claims they make but any time an advertiser is sponsoring some article that is written, you have to evaluate what you are reading.

With that being said, there is some good information contained within the following article: The Secret To Looking Younger By Slowing Aging.

Here are some highlights from the article:

1) People who live longer eat better and generally eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables

2) The secret is in the antioxidants that help the body fight off free radicals

3) Free radicals happen when an electron is lost from an atom because of stress, toxins or normal metabolism.

4) Over times there can be decreased energy, memory loss, heart problems, weakened immune system and a short life span.

5) Antioxidants help restore the electrons to the cells.

6) In a study published May 5, 2005 in the journal, Science, Dr. Peter Rabinovitch at the University of Washington found that mice that produce high levels of antioxidants live 20% longer and have less age related problems.

7) Antioxidants are primarily in fruits and vegetables. Some experts suggest that we should be eating 10 servings a day instead of what the USDA Guidelines states. Of course, if you follow some of the examples on the USDA Guideline chart in the link referenced previously, you may not be any better off. Processed foods are not the same as whole foods.

While this article goes on to promote a product that you can buy, I will not be discussing that here. Personally, I'm not a big believer in products that you buy to make yourself healthy. Most of the things in these commercial products can be done right in your own home and with ingredients you buy in the store. There is no need to pay excessive amounts of profit to companies with claims a mile long that I feel are had to validate.

The one thing we do in our house is whole food smoothies with fruits and vegetables. I learned about this while at a Qigong seminar with Jeff Primack in Orlando, Florida. Outside of the more expensive Blendtech blender, we buy all the ingredients at our local supermarket. There is no special mix to buy. We've been doing this for over a year now and enjoy drinking our smoothies in the morning. To me, doing it in the way this is done is the best thing we can do for our long term health. For more information on this, please check out the following blog posts

1) Food Based Healing Smoothies

2) Smoothies, A Year Later



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