The Healthy and Happy Life Series: Food and Dieting, Emulating Nature to Achieve Weight Loss and Better Health
by
Jonathon Jones
Copyright 2012, by Jonathon Jones
Smashwords Edition
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Table of Contents
SEASONS CHANGE, AND SO SHOULD WE
FRUITS: SMELLS, TASTES, AND CALORIES
VEGETABLES: BLAND, BUT SOMETIMES PASSABLE
DAIRY: A PASTURE FULL OF PEOPLE
NUTS: YOU'RE NOT IF YOU EAT THEM
Introduction
If one misconception exists more than any other, it's that we can trust what we're being told about food. Growers, processors, commercials, the government, and so-called experts often like to convince us that they're after our own best interests when, in fact, many of them have other agendas that are generally much more selfish in nature.
The idea that money talks has saturated this world to the point where we're seriously liable to believe just about anything people will tell us just because they're in charge and have the power and control when it comes to our food supply.
Hopefully, the information contained within this manual will be a step in the right direction to change all of that. The goal of this handbook is to clear away some of the misinformation in order to help people understand not only what they're doing to themselves that can negatively effect their health, but also what they should be doing to make their lives better.
Overall, these will be ideas that are extremely difficult for some people to understand, and the reason for this is quite simple. It's because all we know about what to eat and how to eat has been told to us by external influences our entire lives. Whether we have been supplied these details by our society, our parents, or our grandparents, unless we're in our golden years as of the time of this writing and had more chances for positive influences, the sources for most of our information about food have not been good ones.
We live in a world, and so did they, that has done nothing but stress mass agriculture without careful planning and weighing the consequences of using harmful pesticides. This same world gives us slow-poisoning chemicals to make foods taste good that normally would not. Our current generation talks about preservatives without mentioning the cons, artificiality, believing quicker is always better, and super-sizing everything. However, these are not actual ways in which the real world is supposed to work when it comes to food.
The first step with anything in life to reverse the course of what has been done to us is to understand the differences between what we need and what we think we need. That can only be done if we are able to grasp such concepts as evolution, nature, proper food types, and learning to rely more on our own senses, not to mention having the capacity to accept more logic into our lives.
Evolution
To begin, figuring out what we need and what we don't will never happen until we first look at the history of the human body. The homo sapien body originated approximately two hundred thousand years ago, but we have only been involved in agriculture for approximately ten thousand of those years.
In addition, we have only been immersed in mass processing of foods outside of their natural forms for close to a couple of hundred, and have been using chemicals in foods for much less than that.
Finally, we must also remember that before the fully formed homo sapiens body existed, our pre-modern human forms had been around for approximately a couple of million years, slowly but surely adapting to the food that the Earth could naturally provide.
What does all of this mean to us? It means that a lot of what we are eating and how we are eating it only represents a speck of dust on an island that stands for our entire history as humans on this planet.
Although human beings are living longer lives, we all must realize that it has absolutely nothing to do with the food we are now eating. Our longer life spans are attributed to better medical care, especially when it involves the prevention of contagious diseases, better shelter from the elements, protective measures that keep animals and people from doing us harm, and the ease in which we are now able to find food, even if it's harmful to us.
That last statement may shock some people. After all, if the ease in finding food can help extend our lives, how can that be a bad thing? The reason is simple. When you produce that kind of food quantity and cut corners so that companies can get more bang for their buck, you end up exchanging quantity for less quality. That can have disastrous results for a person's golden years and many times even their youthful ones.
Less vitamins and minerals in the food, more artificial ingredients, and foods that were not even meant to be edible in the first place can cause an increase in cancers, infections, other diseases, fatigue, depression, and even birth defects, and these are happening at an alarming rate.
Sure, we may be living longer, but that long life we all crave might not be the greatest if we all end up spending the last twenty years of it sick, if we even last that long. Many may argue that their 80-100 year old grandparents were fine up until their death, and that the older generation seems to be relatively healthy.
While sometimes that may be true, one must also realize that a 100 year old of today was born in the early part of the 1900s when food pretty much WAS natural. So until the 1940s-1950s or so, they spent the first thirty years of their lives eating healthy. Our generation does not seem to have that advantage, so we should not expect the same results.
In addition, what exactly is a healthy person at ninety or one hundred? We often think of a decrepit old soul struggling on a cane, sometimes wheelchair bound, often with some kind of sickness and having trouble seeing or hearing. But that's not always the way it has to be. Elders from the Okinawa region of Japan, for example, before they started adopting a more Western diet, not only had a large majority of their population live into their hundreds, but they were healthy, active, and even working in their own personal gardens at that age.
That should be our goal. Not to just live a long life, but to make sure it's healthy and it stays healthy so that we can live our entire lives, even the end years, in a much better state of being.
Seasons Change, and So Should We
Evolution cannot be discussed without trying to figure out how our bodies were meant to adapt to the seasons. Certain parts of the world supply certain kinds of foods, and those kinds of foods are usually not available year-round. With seasonal changes, if modern shipping practices did not exist, if we stayed in some areas during the winter, we would all starve or at least be extremely deficient with a lot of vitamins and minerals that we all need.
Think about it this way. Most things that are edible, quite simply, do not even grow in the cold winter months in non-tropical climates. With below freezing temperatures, ice and snow, how could they?
To coincide with this, we also have to think of our skin. Maybe the reason we aren't born with thick coats of fur should be telling us something. We are born without clothes, and, in nature, we would not have a way to stay warm to begin with to stay in those colder areas without freezing to death. Animal skins and artificial materials can help, of course, but since that's not how nature really intended things to be for us, should they?
Perhaps we're thinking too much about what we CAN do as opposed to what nature provided for us and thinking what we SHOULD be doing instead. Maybe the fact that we have no natural protection from the winter temperatures in colder climates and the fact that our main food sources die in the colder, snowy areas means we were not supposed to stay in those areas once we started feeling the chill.
In my honest opinion, I actually think that we were meant to be migratory like birds. At the first sign of cold, perhaps walking south for the winter to find warmth and a greater chance at food was our intended purpose all along. If that transpired, what would that mean? That, in nature, we have more of a need for fall and winter-grown tropical foods than we would in the spring and fall.
It makes sense, really. To keep our immune systems up during colder times, we would need a constant supply of vitamin C, and the best places to find that in the winter are in the more tropical climates.
The other thing that this means is, overall, we need a year-round variety of foods as opposed to the same ones in order to give our bodies everything they need. This is another reason I believe we were meant to migrate from one area to the next. Although some foods are more important during the winter, especially citrus-based foods, our bodies have adapted throughout the millions of years to a much wider variety of natural foods than what we are now getting.
Some might argue that we actually do have a variety of foods. Yes, we do, but for the most part it's the wrong kind. The variety we have is not from natural sources but, instead, extremely unnatural ones. This is one of the many reasons so many people in this world, especially in the United States and European countries that have adopted our lifestyle, are overweight and the average weight has gone up considerably.