FOOD AND HEALTH
To be healthy is one thing we all want. The sad part about being healthy is that you really have to eat healthy to be healthy. And you need to exercise. And you need to be relatively happy.

Which means: it’s a bit of a job.

And yet: the wonderful part of being healthy is that you get to eat really great tasting food. And another wonderful part is that you get to get outside and do what your body loves to do: move around. And a final wonderful part of being healthy is that you can enjoy your life so much more when you are happy and healthy.

Happy?

We’ll talk some about happiness tomorrow ( see Happiness and the Work at the slow sonoma site, as these essays are one a day, but rotate thru the sites), when we come to the Byron Katie work, but for now please consider this as a stunning possibility: we are the ones who chose to be happy or not to be happy.

And now to food. It’s the new year and people like to think about eating healthy. The first thing that comes to mind, usually, is to eliminate junk foods. Good thought. If it comes in a package, if it’s got a list of ingredients on the package (or can), you can probably live just fine without it. If it’s served at a fast foods place, you don’t even have to hear what I have to say about that.

And still there is a core to healthy eating that is contradictory to the habits and addictions of most people in this sickly country. This core is to eat lots of fresh, raw, in-season and organic food.

And to avoid two elements.

A little background on these elements. In the 1930’s a dentist named Weston Price went around the world to find people with the best teeth. He found these people in small enclaves as varied in diet as blood drinkers in Africa, fish and oatmeal eaters in the British Channel Islands, fish and fruit and nut and vegetable eaters of the Pacific Islands, raw cheese and sourdough rye bread farmers in the Swiss Alps. Since this was the thirties, and the “modern” world as coming in fast, most of these people had relatives or a nearby village who had gone “modern,” which meant : sugar and refined flour. Without exception, the people who had gone “modern” had poor teeth and all the diseases of our time, cancer, heart disease, arthritis and so on. Those eating their “traditional” diets had almost perfect teeth (one cavity per twenty people or so), as well almost a total absence of these “modern” diseases.

He wrote a book about it, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. And the modern way to get this information is to get Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions, and read all her commentary between and around the recipes. I advocate a different diet than Sally Fallon, but she makes the case strong and clear of what Weston Price discovered:

(1)IF YOU WANT TO BE HEALTHY, FIND WAYS OF GETTING SWEET WITHOUT SUGAR. Pears and apples, honey and stevia, sweet potatoes and carrots, there is a lot of sweet in the world without sugar. And

(2) FIGURE OUT HOW TO LIVE LIFE WITHOUT REFINED FLOUR.

That’s “hard,” if you want to stay the same as everyone else, and maybe not so hard if you are excited to explore changing your habits, and seeing what life without bread and crackers and cookies and cakes is like.

For incentive, think of Scott Nearing, co-author (with his wife Helen), of Living the Good Life, out building with stone and working in his garden until his late nineties, and compare that with most of those we see even in their eighties.

There are many books out there with thousands of healthy and delicious recipes that live a life free of sugar and refined flour. Maybe you’d like to explore them. Maybe not.

These choices are always wonderful and exciting and best to be led by an intuitive pull. Maybe you’ll feel the tug.

(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Life on Earth ::: Slow Sonoma
for the last two essays.)