My Food Beliefs

I read this quote once and it absolutely describes how I feel:

The only packaged food I believe in is whole foods coming in Nature’s own packaging. -Mike Adams, NaturalNews.com.

One of my heroes, Dr. Seignalet, the famous French immunologist, called his masterpiece work “Alimentation ou la Troisième Médecine” (Food or the Third Medicine). Although I absolutely agree with his vision that food can be one of the way to heal ourselves–the other two modern ways of healing being allopathic Western medicine and alternative medicine–I firmly believe that being healthy and staying that way should be accomplished through food first.

For too long, we have been trained to believe that the only way to stay healthy is to trust the modern medicine way of healing through chemical medication and physical surgery. I believe that it is the wrong way to look at it. If we feed our bodies healthy food to begin with, we are less likely to need these harsh treatments.

I do agree that modern medicine can be useful in cases of emergency. If you break your arm, going to the emergency room is the best way to treat that broken bone. But you should help the healing along with good quality food.

I also agree that, in some cases, supplementation is necessary to remedy a lack of a specific vitamin or mineral. Such a lack, however, often points to an imbalance in your basic diet. Ideally–and I do know we don’t live in an ideal world–we should get all of our nutrients from our food.

In our modern society, our feeding habits have been so influenced by the constant marketing of what they call “food” that we don’t know how to eat an everyday, balanced diet anymore. Our fast-paced lifestyle forces us to eat on the run, swallow fast food and reheat convenience industrialized meals loaded with chemical and artificial flavorings, colorings and preservatives.

Let’s be honest about it: many commercially-prepared foods are woefully low in nutrients. Heating these foods in microwave ovens can further reduce what little nutritional value they began with. We are eating nutritionally-dead food and we wonder why we are hungry two hours after eating a meal? Our body wants and needs real and nutritious food to function!

Junk food makes us sick!

With such a meal, we have filled our bodies with empty calories and all sorts of chemical junk. Of course it wants more! Then, because we feel a lack of energy, we eat a sweetened snack to keep us going until the next empty meal and so on, and so forth.

After a few years of abuse, our body starts to break down and degenerative diseases are starting to show up: heartburn, digestive problems, hypoglycemia, type 2 diabetes, weight gain, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart problems, strokes and cancer, to name a few.

Of course! What do we expect? We feed our body junk and as wonderful a living machine as it was created, it starts breaking down due to the abuse we subject it to.

Most of you know that if you fill your car with regular gasoline when it’s supposed to run on premium, eventually your engine will start to malfunction, gunk up and eventually break down. It amazes me that the vast majority of people in this country maintain their bodies more poorly than their cars. And they wonder why they get sick!

What we need is to slow down, pay attention to our body’s basic needs, and take good care of it as we would our car, and fuel it properly. Our body is our temple and as such, we should show it utmost respect, love and care. Please love your body the way it deserves and it will take care of itself. The result will be a good and long lasting health.

From a purely economic point of view, eating healthy to stay healthy also makes perfect sense. As I have told my son repeatedly, I prefer to spend a little more money now while enjoying good-tasting healthy food than spend all my money later in expensive supplements, health insurance premiums, doctor’s treatments or hospital bills.

Why not enjoy life and the good health provided to us by nature, and prevent disease in the process?

Being sick is not our natural state. Given the opportunity and good quality food, our immune system will keep us strong and healthy for a long time. Unfortunately, our society has taught us to think short term and not in terms of prevention and long-term health.

Take back your power of self-care

I believe that we should all regain control of our own health through self-care. We must take back what is ours – our power to decide what is in the best interest of our health.

Yes, we need professional guidance to help us make these decisions, but the final decision should be ours. For too long, we have abdicated our health decisions to others. It is time to take that power back and be responsible for our own health choices. We need to take responsibility for how we treat and feed our bodies.

Health Coverage in America

It is not a secret that the health care costs in this country are outrageous. If you’re lucky, you are covered by your company’s group health insurance. Even if you can afford to pay the premium, you end up paying good money for assorted deductibles and procedures that are not covered by your plan. And that is, if you have health insurance.

It is a well-known fact that millions of people in this country–the most advanced country in the world–either are not offered insurance coverage by their company because it’s too expensive or, if they are out of work, cannot afford to pay for any form of health insurance.

Although I’m fully aware that I’m simplifying things here, wouldn’t it make sense to take the best care we can of ourselves, to at least keep the costs down?

Health Starts in the Gut (That “Gut Feeling”)

In our modern days, it seems the wisdom of the gut is lost. For centuries, it has been known that health begins and ends in the gut. Many of our modern degenerative diseases start with a damaged digestive system. How we treat our stomach, our small intestine, and our colon determines how we ultimately feel overall.

Modern medicine focuses too much on the symptoms of after-the-fact health issues; I believe we need to start thinking about proper digestive system maintenance first. What’s the use of ”fixing” an unlimited list of symptoms after the fact, if we do not pay attention to the basics first? Heal the gut and the symptoms will eventually disappear.

Acid reflux, heartburn and GERD are due to your stomach’s ill health. Many digestive problems can be traced back to damage caused to our small intestine. Illnesses such as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), Crohn’s disease and colon cancer have been linked to the type of foods we ingest. Treat your gut well, and it will return the favor.

How we eat, not just what we eat, is important to digestive health!

In our stressed-out, fast-fast-fast society where we feel that the more we do and the faster we do it is a good thing, the speed of our lives is one of the ways we make ourselves sick. Eating on the run, eating while standing up (sur le pouce in French) or worse, eating “fast” food while driving (by the way, is it fast because it’s prepared quickly, or because we scarf down that “food” in less than 5 minutes?) while we rush from one appointment to another across town.

How We Should Eat

Old-fashioned wisdom has it right. Take your time to eat and enjoy your food.

There are many reasons for this: first, our food should be chewed properly, so that we puree our food in very small pieces. Remember, your stomach does not have teeth; it cannot do this for you.

Another reason for thorough chewing is it allows our salivary enzymes, salivary amylase and ptyalin, to start the digestive process, especially of carbohydrates. The macrobiotic philosophy suggests that we chew each bite of food at least 50 times before we swallow it. I know, who has the time? But we should still make an effort.

Another thing to be avoided is eating under stress. Taking a 30-minute lunch break is too short to allow us to eat our food calmly and with awareness; an hour is better. Better yet, in the South of France, before the advent of air conditioning, we used to stop working from noon to 3 pm to allow us to go back home, eat a homemade meal in a leisurely manner with our families and even take a nap after that. It’s still done this way in small villages where traffic doesn’t prevent you from going home for lunch.

When I was an apprentice in 1969, I heard a Parisian couple complaining about us lazy Southerners because we were taking a 3-hour lunch break and the store was closed. In the minds of big city folks, this was unacceptable. Having being myself through the 8-hour (and longer) shifts in this country, I now realize the wisdom of our Southern tradition.

We first start by whetting the appetite with an aperitif (if you’re old enough) or une menthe a l’eau (mint-flavored water, if you’re young). While we wait for the food to be ready, we have a nice conversation.

We then enjoy a light meal accompanied with a lively discussion, a nice strong (but small) espresso coffee and even, on special days, a pousse-café (after-coffee digestive liquor). Now that’s living!

When eating, there should be no distraction from the enjoyment of food but good company. No TV, no computer, no reading books or magazines. We should focus on chewing our food.