Naturally Simple Blog

We have been doing a good job of staying healthy this winter around our house.  Other than the bout of H1N1 which hit us in October and one gastrointestinal virus which were both short-lived, we have been pretty healthy.  (Riley gets sick once in awhile, but that is to be expected when one exists on a diet of soda, corn chips and queso dip.)

We still have to weather the transition from winter to spring in late March, though.  That is usually the peak of the cold and flu season, so I thought perhaps now would be a good time to discuss my thoughts on nutrition.  I don’t really believe that “ramping up” your nutrient intake once you are sick is very useful, other than perhaps in providing your body with the extra-nutrition it needs at the time.   But what if you ate every day as though you are fighting off a virus or a cold; maybe you would find that you didn’t get sick in the first place.
I  do not like pill pushing regardless of what is in them.  You shouldn’t need to take encapsulated herbs or a fistful of manufactured vitamins every day, in place of food. While I am sure that in cases where a blood test has shown there to be a deficiency, supplements can be useful to catch the body up.   I prefer to avoid the deficiency in the first place.

I also don’t like using them from a sustainability standpoint.  I don’t want my well-being to be dependent on any industry and it would be rather hypocritical of me to talk a good game about local sustainable food systems when half my nutrients are arriving on a boat from China.  This is one of the reasons that I tend to focus on using herbs and foods that I can grow or wild-craft in my area.

I   mention this so that you know that I really am not very much help when it comes to giving advice about supplements.  Sometimes people are surprised that I haven’t bothered to learn about this sort of thing.  Studying herbalism, to them, should be a study of which bottled herbs you should buy at the supermarket or nutrition store in the mall.   Unfortunately, I can’t tell you which company produces the best supplements and  I try to avoid those aisles at all cost, for fear of saying something offensive.  I do openly admit that I came by my aversion to pills honestly.  Back in the days before I knew better, I lost a lot of weight (125 pound) with these bottled supplements and almost destroyed my health in the process.

For the next couple of weeks, I am going to post about different ways eating and cooking with herbs can help to improve your health.   Hopefully I will post some recipes you would consider trying along the way and give you new things to think about when making meals.   Do keep in mind though that I am a staunch proponent of the concept of having “all things in moderation”.  Don’t fight with yourself (or your family) to entirely give up a questionable food substance, just don’t abuse your body with it and use the healthiest form of the substance possible.

Some General Guidelines I Follow

1.  When you don’t eat properly, your body does not find the nutrition in the food you eat, it will find the nutrients someplace in your body such as your bones, muscles or brain matter.   This is especially true of protein which your body will leach from your muscles or brain matter and vitamins and calcium which your body will take from your bones.  A vast majority of health complaints in this country; fatigue, mental fogginess, depression, etc… are caused by your bodies natural response to incomplete nutrition.

2.  It should go without saying, but purchase as many organic foods as you can afford and avoid eating food additives.  The best way to do this inexpensively, is to learn to cook and bake your own food.
3.  70-80% percent of your daily intake of food should be in the form of organic whole-grains, vegetables (including legumes), fruits, and herbs.   Don’t be afraid of fats & oils though.  Your body needs a certain amount to function properly.   I cook with mostly olive oil, and I bake with butter, coconut oil and applesauce.

4. Regardless of what they taught our parents in the fifties, darker is better where most foods are concerned.  Refined white foods have been completely robbed of nutrients and should be avoided.  Brown rice, old-fashioned oats, whole wheat flour, (we compromise around here on the white whole wheat) and whole hulled barley are far more nutritious than their polished counterparts.

5.   I don’t avoid sugar completely, but I don’t use it often and I NEVER use the white junk they sell at the grocery store.   I don’t even enjoy the constant influx of “sweet” that many people crave.  I think it is because I get plenty of B vitamins.  I read someplace that craving sugar was a sign of a B vitamin deficiency which makes sense when you think about it as sugar cane naturally contains B Vitamins.   Unfortunately, sugar in the form of the white sucrose powder you buy in the store is completely devoid of the B vitamins.  So when you bake with sugar, you should be substituting locally produced honey, organic molasses, sucanat, turbinado, or evaporated cane juice in recipes that call for sugar.   Maple syrup is nice too, but opt for “Grade B” maple syrup which is less refined and retains more of its natural nutrients.    I avoid high fructose corn syrup like the plague and I don’t use agave nectar nor do I plan to base on the information I have read.

6.  Eat Your Herbs!   I have learned that by taking in herbs in the form of nourishing infusions, tonic nutritive vinegars and most importantly by eating them,  you can provide your body with a much broader spectrum of daily nutrients than you can by with food, alone.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Herbalism, Health, Eating Your Herbs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.