endurancefellowship said:
When we make decisions for our meals and snacks, what are our priorities? Is it taste, texture, or nutrition? Some people like soft tacos while others prefer hard shell. Pizzas come with a wide variety of toppings and types of crust. Vanilla is the most popular flavor of ice cream, yet people line up at Baskin and Robbins because there are 31 flavors. Sour cream goes great with Mexican food, but not everyone orders an extra portion like me. A sweeping observation seems to indicate that the people of our nation eat more often for entertainment and pleasure than nutrition.
Pay closer attention; do food advertisements focus on nutrition or pleasure? Take a tour of a supermarket and compare the number and placement of products that are just recreational and not nutritional. The candy, ice cream, chips, cookies, frozen pizzas, and breakfast cereals comprise the largest and most prominent areas of our local market. I have also noticed that those companies are the most aggressive in advertising and offering specials and coupons. Are your eating priorities and habits falling prey to this pressure?
Should we put things in our mouth that give us short term satisfaction or should we eat for long term health and wellness? I am trying to retrain my mind to make better choices that will benefit my boys for the rest of my life and theirs too. Instead of using drugs to fight disease, let's use better nutritional food choices.
Gerry Geraghty
Endurance Fellowship
I think many people eat for satisfaction and choose satisfying foods over nutrition, if indeed they know anything about it. I try to get from the (traditional) 5 food groups: vegetables, fruits, meat (or protein group) diary, and grain.
All that being said, there is some modifications to our thinking, for both the medical establishment and the head-band wearing sweat-a-holic exercisers and naturalists have both given us bad guidance (same circus just operating from different sides of the street).
Here's some examples of what I do personally, and where people are mislead. I personally eat more vegetables than fruits. I like salads more. I really do, not just because it's good for me. Then I load the dressing on it. People at work joke saying it was healthy until I added the dressing. They are right, but the reasons they think it's bad are for the wrong ones: Dressing is not the best thing because it's man-made and the chemicals. They think it's bad because it has fat and egg yolks or something in it. On the contrary, I could make my own dressing with all that fat and egg yokes in it (but no processing) and it would be the healthiest thing. So, they were lied to.
That takes me to another good food item in the protein group: the egg. However, thankfully I have the system beat on this one since my sister-in-law raises her own free-roaming chickens, so I make sure I get plenty of eggs in my diet, perhaps a dozen a week. I think the only thing "bad" in the supermarket egg is the hormones and other things they feed the chickens. It's that and not the egg itself that's a problem.
Likewise, I eat salted almonds. I make sure I get enough salt in my daily diet like any vital mineral. Again, I think the problem with almonds are not the almonds themselves, but what man does to them--- reminds me of milk. I tend to steer clear of too much diary as milk, but only because it is pasteurized. Raw milk would be better than the mutilated chemical formula they "call" milk. But I do have my weakness for chocolate milk so some I rationalize will not hurt me. Again, the milk is fine, and it should contain the fat (not skim), but the processing destroys a lot of nutrition and then they think the milk gives us problems.
Vitamins of all sorts are good, too. However, I giga-dose on them because I don't know what man even does to them to make them less effective. This way I have a better (but not perfect) chance of getting enough. BTW, I found there is
ONE vital vitamin that you rarely hear anything about yet it is PRINCIPLE in preventing heart disease and cancer. Cutting one' cholesterol won't cut heart disease---- that's a myth. Rather, it's the ability of one's body to keep it from oxidizing. There's even another chemical that increases the risk that this vitamin keeps in check!
But ironically the FDA makes it ILLEGAL to sell them in pill form more than 100% RDA (maybe its 200%) whereas they allow many other vitamins to be made as big as they want! I personally take 5-6 times the legal pill size myself and hope I am getting enough even though what I take in pill form is illegal.
Another valuable vitamin is D that keeps us from getting cancer and a host of other things. But the best way to get that is naturally and your body needs two vital ingredients to make it:
cholesterol and sunlight (UVB spectrum). I treat cholesterol like any vital nutrient, but fortunately your body makes most of it. I'd be careful with the sunlight however. The problem with sunlight is that we think we are getting enough vitamin D form it when in fact UVB is not getting thru, and vitamin D supplementation is nowhere near what a good sunned person gets. Apart from moving down to the tropics, I haven't a good answer for this one yet, other than to sun myself when I can (if it's good sunlight, about 1/2 hour to an hour a day is enough).
So, that's the "skinny" on my nutritional perspective after about 30 years of dabbling in the stuff (when I started at age 20).
