|
Most people focus on enjoying their food because it tastes good, but we need food for three main purposes:
- For Energy: Fuel (calories), necessary to perform daily work and basically to allow the heart, lungs and other organs to function
- For Building blocks: Raw materials like proteins, minerals etc. is used to manufacture blood, skin, bones, hair, and internal organs; our bodies are constantly replacing and renewing every cell on a daily to monthly basis
- For Catalysts: Chemical compounds like vitamins, enzymes and some minerals are necessary to facilitate the chemical reactions that convert food into energy and into the body's organs.
We need to understand that our bodies require food for energy every few hours. That is why it is important to eat five meals per day. Simply the body require food or an energy boost every 3-4 hours. We are so biologically programmed to immediately sense a lack of energy - we experience hunger pains. But the body is composed of about 60% water and requires at least 1.7L of fresh water daily. If you do not drink water regularly on a daily basis you can become chronically dehydrated and mistake thirst for hunger. Remember a drop of as little as 2% in body water can trigger fatigue and mental dysfunction. It is interesting to note that if you drink at least 5 glasses of water daily you can decrease the risk of colon cancer by 45%, the risk of breast cancer by 79% and the risk of risk of bladder cancer by 50%
The body also need specific foods as building blocks and catalysts on a daily or semidaily basis. We usually only become aware of missing building blocks and catalysts when our bodies become ill from these deficiencies. Sometimes we mistakenly think that as adults that our bodies are fully grown. The fact is that the individual cells actually replace themselves on a daily to monthly basis. Did you know that our manufacture 200 billion red blood cells each day, replacing all the blood in our bodies every 120 days or that skin is completely replaced every 1 to 3 months or that it takes 90 days for old bone to be broken down and replaced by new bone?
If we don't get enough protein, vitamins and minerals we can experience systems like mood swings, fatigue, nervousness, headaches, confusion and muscle weakness. In the long term such poor nutrition can cause cancer, hypertension, Alzheimer's and many other disease that we wrongly just accept as part of the aging process. Medicine on the other hand treats these problems with drugs that focus on the symptoms rather than the core problem. The core problem being What we eat or more accurately in the case of poor nutrition What we Don't eat.
Simply we need food, healthy food and a great variety thereof on a daily basis. We need to eat with the needs of bodies in mind and not our taste buds only!
|
