FOOD

What is the meaning of food to your perspective? Are you what you eat? Food brings us essence of life – vitality – through the manner it is grown in good natural fertile soil, good quality water that it is fed with, the sun rays and the clean air that it is grown in. And obviously the manner the food is cooked, how and when we eat it to get its maximum absorption of its quality nutrient to be absorbed by our digestive system. These are food that has good life force that we should eat to ensure that its nutrients are easily digested and absorbed to nourish our whole body system to keep us in a balance state of health.

Food is love, food is full, food is complete, food is stability, food is support and food is energy. We have this link and bonding if the food we eat are healthy food, otherwise ingest of non life force food (a.k.a dead food – food with no life force: think processed, packaged, artificial coloured food) will lead us to an impair indigestion leading to an imbalance state of health that can manifest over time to a disease if we do not address our digestion issue properly.

We eat 3 meals a day from the day we are born to the day we depart and go back to mother earth. If we calculate the meals that we eat during our lifetime, it would be in the region of about 76000 meals if we live up to 70 years old. Each life force meal we eat – we are nourished.

In today’s modern farming, the focus is on growing the quantity to increase production and not the quality to feed the world population at the expense of introducing GMO (genetically modified organism) food, heavy pesticides and chemicals grown food. These type of growing methods disrupt the natural growth of good nutritional uptake of nutrients from our mother earth and with intake of these type of food regularly, it will impair our state of health to be imbalance. We will suffer malnutrition from 2 aspects. Firstly, malnutrition happening in developed countries whereby there is ample type of quantity processed food that they eat that makes them overweight and food is not properly absorbed. Secondly, malnutrition happening in under-developed countries whereby there is not enough food to eat which leads the population to be malnourish due to famine. So where shall we put our stand on real food choice for our body? What choices can we make right for ourselves to eat healthy and eat real food?

These answer lies in our awareness and understanding on the environment and the source of the food that is grown for us to purchase. How often would you take this initiative to sit back and analyse, think whether these food items are really good quality fresh food? Then how about are we going to decide where to buy our food? Buy organic food? Is it too expensive to pay to feed the whole family?

Commercial food production, processing and handling methods in modern farming methods has reduced the quality of minerals and vitamins that are essential for our body to absorb and utilize. If our diet is deficient in these essential nutrients, we will develop illness. Together with this problem we are also faced with a toxic polluted environment, radiation from our modern technology gadgets surrounding us, it stresses our nutrition reserve more. This ongoing imbalance will require our body to detoxify and eliminate these pollutants and at the same time, our body will degenerate from the deficient nutrient from the commercial food we ingest.

Shouldn’t we make some changes to the choice of food that we should really be eating? The important aspect Ayurveda emphasises on choice of food – is food that is fresh and has good life force. This means that it is not all that necessary to eat organic food but to eat local fresh food in season that are home cook and eaten with love and compassion put into the cooking by our mothers or wives and husbands. Assessing the source of the farmers’ ethic and compassion to grow the fresh food to sell at the farmers market would be a good choice to purchase much fresher food. We should be learning how our grandmas used to cook for the family to understand how we can go back to basic home cooking that uses the freshest ingredients without any artificial flavourings, preservatives, colour addictives, or chemical food stabiliser.

If we set our health objective to eat fresh life force food, we are setting our pathway to maintain a balance healthy body and as we degenerate naturally as we aged, we have all the knowledge of handling our health in a more realistic manner as I always believe that ‘Food is Medicine’ for our body.

Some Eating Strategies for Wellness:

• Improve the quality of the foods you eat. Farmers market are putting consumers back in touch with the way food has been produced
• Give our kids local grown, certified organic fresh whole food. Organic food has fewer pesticide and herbicide resides than conventional grown food
• Eat natural, living, nutrient-rich foods
• Make food choices that are good for the environment
• Grow your own food (kids will enjoy doing this!)
• Run your tap water through a home filter. Filters can reduce the wide range of toxic chemicals and pollutants common in tap water.
• Eat hormone and antibiotic free meat and dairy products
• Avoid microwaving food
• Store food preferably in glass containers.
• Prepare your own home cooked meals. Home cooking is healthier and you know what is in the final food product.
• Buy food that uses minimal packaging and processing.
• Avoid expensive imported food stuffs, support the local industry.