Following the food pyramid is a good place to start and maybe it’s a good place to end for some people. If you take all the food somebody eats at the end of the week and then add them all up and how much variety there was, you will find that there really wasn’t that much variety. People generally have a dozen foods they like to eat and they will end up eating the same foods day after day for most of their life and that is where you run into problems. You get stuck in a rut and fail to incorporate a vast variety into your diet and fail to get the nutritional balance that you should be getting. If you know nothing about food but incorporate a lot of variety of fresh fruit and vegetables, cereals, dairy, protein sources, small amount of “good” fats, and legumes and nuts into your diet the chances of your missing out on the right nutrients essential for
good health are lowered. When it comes to fresh fruit and vegetables, some people like to use a diet out there called the Rainbow diet. It’s based on all the different colors of fruits and vegetables. So I will take purple grapes and onions and garlic and sprinkle some lettuce and if we have fresh strawberries I will add those to cantaloupe and really your imagination is your only limitation. Just basically add all your favorite fruits and vegetables and season it to taste. Mix it all up and you have an incorporation of all of that variety. You get all of the vitamins and the nutrients and the minerals that you need in just one meal instead of just ingesting one kind of food.

My point is the more variety you can get in your diet the greater the possibility that if you are lacking in something that you are going to get it. I am an advocate of getting variety in your diet. It all comes down to looking at your budget and having some knowledge of getting what you need and looking at the food
labels. With just a little bit of knowledge of how to read food labels and what you need you can make the right choices with the money that you have to work with. Even the restaurants and the fast food chains are starting to offer more nutritious choices, likes salads. Subway is one that has really jumped on the bandwagon. You know the one with Jared standing there saying this deep fat fried sandwich contains 45
plus grams of fat and compare it to the subway sandwich.

Red wine may be preferred because of the antioxidants that you get and the other chemicals that come along with the wine. Obviously there is something in the red wine as opposed to the white that makes it more beneficial. Alcohol is the second highest source of calories, behind fat. The higher the level of alcohol in the beverage the higher the caloric intake is. One gram of alcohol supplies 29 kcal’s. It isn’t as high as fat but not as low as protein and carbohydrates.

There are other aspects of that to think about, if you are trying to lose weight you need to question whether you need the extra calories. There are many other beverages that would provide many more nutrients. If you are trying to lose weight you need to question whether or not you need those extra calories from something that basically has no nutritional value. I would tend to be more negative about consuming alcohol because, besides the dangers of alcoholism, there is the obvious danger of drinking too much and consuming way too many calories. So I am not an advocate of drinking alcohol because it has no nutritional value or health value, particularly because any nutritional benefit that you can get from alcohol, can also be found elsewhere in our food.

Researchers are constantly looking for foods that could burn fat. Some of them concentrate on milk and dairy products that have been theorized to burn fat through increasing inadequate calcium intake. Some concentrate on finding a specific diet that will burn fat like a high protein diet. While there is evidence for and against – it has never been proven beyond a doubt that there is any one type of food or type of eating that can burn fat.
When it comes down to it, it is a marketing myth that just got so large that everyone started to talk about it, and pretty soon, people started to believe that food could burn fat. In reality food provides energy and nutrients, but cannot burn fat.

A fat is a waxy, oily substance and is essential for good health. Fat has double the amount of calories and so poses a problem to individuals who find it difficult to exercise. If you break down a fat you break it down into something called a fatty acid and glycerol.

Proteins are made up of chains of amino acids and are necessary for your body to build enzymes, antibodies and haemoglobin. When you eat protein, your body breaks the protein down into amino acids and then tries to re-assemble them into other configurations to make other needed proteins for use around the body.

Carbohydrates, fats and protein can all be broken down into smaller units. Each one of those macronutrients can be sub-divided. In the case of proteins, proteins are made up of amino acids. Not all proteins have the eight essential amino acids that the body needs. If you are consuming protein and you miss out the essential ones for long periods of time, you are putting yourself at risk of becoming malnourished. In some cultures around the world where food isn’t so plentiful, children can become malnourished and develop diseases such as Kwashiorkor. The children have the distended tummies, however the rest of their bodies are fine, this
unfortunately is caused by a protein deficiency. Scientists can actually measure the quality of nutrients that
people are getting. People will volunteer to be involved in a clinical feeding trial and they will hook these people up to all kinds of measuring devices to measure everything from body temperature to how much moisture they exhale.

The best way to change your bad eating habits is to do it very slowly. If you try to change everything all at once, it will seem too hard to maintain. Try changing one thing at a time. For example, perhaps you like a morning cappuccino. Decide to stop drinking your morning cappuccino and drink bottled water instead. Don’t change anything else about your eating habits until you feel totally comfortable about that dietary change.
Then move on to something else, like healthy snacks. Instead of that chocolate energy bar, pack a piece of fruit and a small tub of yogurt. Essentially fruit is natures snack food, it’s also cheaper.
Once you’re comfortable with this change, then move onto something else. You get the picture. When you’ve got your diet sorted out, then you can move on to getting some exercise into your lifestyle. So it doesn’t have to be an abrupt change you just need to understand more about what you are eating and what the energy value is and the nutrient value of the foods you are consuming, and make slow but sure changes to your lifestyle.

In the big picture, there is no difference between the two. You can look at anything that provides nutrients to the body like carbohydrates, protein, and fats. Food in general is just a carrier for nutrients. For example, take a loaf of bread – it has starch in it and protein and non-fat dry milk, the non-fat dry milk also contains lactose. It will also contain a high amount of minerals. The non-fat dry milk will contain casein, which is a non-fat milk
protein. When you eat food, you break down the food to get nutrients for the body.

Nutrition starts with eating food and drinking drink. The body then breaks down the food and drink into its respective nutrients. These nutrients then travel around the body to be used wherever necessary. Carbohydrates are converted into glucose or fuel for the body, protein is broken down into amino acids and fats are broken down into fatty acids. For a person to be healthy, a person must eat enough food to get a good supply of all the key nutrients.

There is a set of guidelines that the government publishes for 20 or so different vitamins, minerals and nutrients and those values are based on population studies, where they go out and look at the health of the general population and consider what people consume on a regular basis.

Nutrition is based on getting all the right balance of nutrients necessary for good health. A food stuff is a raw material that can be made into a food. Only eating particular foods or foods stuffs will not help you be healthier.

If you’re a meat and potatoes kind of person, get some vegetables and fruit into your diet. An exclusively protein and starch diet will cause an unhealthy mix of bacteria in your bowels to flourish.If you like to have a big, cold glass of milk with every meal, including your steak and potatoes… don’t. Dairy products and meat protein are digested differently. Meat relies heavily on acid hydrolysis, that is, stomach acids break down protein into small pieces that can be further digested by enzymes. Dairy—milk—is alkaline. It neutralizes the acid in the stomach. While the stomach can fight back by producing more acid, sipping that cold milkshake while eating your triple-decker hamburger turns out to be a losing battle for meat-protein digestion. Meanwhile, the over-production of acid interferes with the enzymatic digestion of the milk products. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
There are those, even in the medical community, that might dispute some of the fine points of this analysis. Again, as stated early on in this book, we’re trying to avoid too much of the biology and chemistry except where little smatterings give you some perspective. If you doubt, conduct a poll. Next Christmas, when you walk into the bathroom after Cousin Harry has used it and you find the wallpaper peeling off, watch how he’s the one sipping the glass of milk while enjoying the spiral-cut ham.
Rather than belabor this point, the main message you should glean from this discussion is that horrid bathroom smell is not normal. It is a sign of digestive issues that, if left unresolved for long periods of time, can cause you to “suddenly” get a serious disease later in life.

1. Heavy metals: mercury, cadmium, arsenic, lead, iron and aluminum4

a. A more extensive list would include antimony, bismuth, cerium, chromium, cob alt, copper, gallium, gold, manganese, nickel, platinum, silver, tellurium, thallium, tin, uranium, vanadium, and zinc.
b. A few of these are necessary in trace amounts, such as manganese and zinc, but can quickly become toxic if present in excess… and, yes, even iron can be toxic in large amounts or in its improper form.

2. Chemicals: pesticides, preservatives, hormones, antibiotics, metabolic analogs such as artificial sweeteners, food dyes, and even additives to our drinking water mandated by our government such as chlorine and fluoride.

3. Biologicals: yeast, viruses, parasites, non-native bacteria.

4. Common foods and food additives that cause toxic reactions including allergies.

• Toxins are substances that disrupt the normal, healthy function of your body. They may be elemental, chemical, biological, or a normal food that causes metabolic irritation.
• Toxins are present in the air we breathe, water we drink and food we eat… including the so-called “healthy” foods; broccoli can be covered in pesticides, too.
• Toxic “load” is the cumulative effect of all the offending substances that you have ingested.
• Long before you reach your load-limit that causes external disease, the toxins start to impact your immune system effectively lowering your limit; it’s a downward spiral.
• The government will not protect you by ensuring the cleanliness of your food9.
• It is each person’s responsibility, and the responsibility of parents for their children, to act intelligently with regard to what they eat, drink, and even breathe to protect and foster the health of their bodies and minds.

Toxins are substances that inhibit or harm normal, healthy operation of your body.

A note: just because science hasn’t discovered that a substance is harmful, doesn’t mean that it’s not. At one time we didn’t know that the pesticide DDT was harmful—and not knowing didn’t make it harmless3. However, for now, we feel that biological and medical science has progressed sufficiently far to have fairly well classified most of the substances that are poisonous to human health. This includes broad groupings of chemical compounds, such as pesticides in general. If we can eliminate those from our bodies, and our future foods, we’ll be far better off.

Then we can work on avoiding the introduction of any new and unnecessary substances into our diet.
The following is a list of the toxins and toxic substances which are present in our environment. This list is not all-inclusive, but is meant to give you an idea of how pervasive the assault on our health really is. The shame is that much of the attack on our well being is the product of economic greed and can be easily avoided with just a small hit to the profits of major corporations—but that’s the subject of a different book.