Eating to Live!

Diversify your food

I dabble only slightly in the stock market for fun and I can’t stay that I am an expert in investing. But I know that putting my money into one type of stocks is not a good thing. In fact, I am reminded of the crash shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, that nearly ruined the technological market and proved devastating for people who sunk all of their money into tech stocks. Brokers and analysts were screaming diversity.

What does this have to do with food?

Simply put, diversity is not just important when making investments. It is essential to good health and a good diet.

We all know that our bodies need protein, carbohydrates and fats to be healthy. All of these components are broken down into sugar, which our body then uses for fuel. We also know that there are simple carbohydrates and complex carbohydrates. Our systems break down simple carbs quickly while the complex carbs take a bit longer. Simple carbs are things such as white flour, white potatoes, white bread, white rice and pretty much all refined and processed food. The complexity of many of those foods has been lost in the processing process. Sure, a lot of these foods have lots of stuff added back in, like calcium and synthetic vitamins, but here’s the problem; science has not yet defined every minor nutrient that our body needs to operate efficiently. They know that we need the major nutrients in that particular food, but they don’t know all of the minor nutrients, of which there are probably thousands that haven’t yet been identified. Not only that, but science has yet to determine how these nutrients interact with each other. A vital missing nutrient could very well affect how our bodies use something else that might be either left behind or added back in artificially.

This may sound confusing, but here’s a simple way to make sure you are getting everything you need from your food. Eat real food, the way nature intended, as it was grown straight from the ground. And to diversify our diets, we need to eat lots of different foods.

As omnivore’s, we are not limited to one particular food item. Although some animals can get everything they need from one food source (Koala bears come to mind as they eat a diet strictly made up of eucalyptus leaves and nothing else), humans are programmed to eat a lot of different types of food. We have incisors for tearing and chewing meat and we have flat molars for grinding vegetables and grains. It’s how we are made.

Man can not live on chicken nuggets and French fries alone.

I have to apologize for not blogging for the past week. An episode with my husband, which could very well have been caused by a lack of diversity in his diet, sent him to the hospital for a few days. We are addressing the problem and as you probably figured out, this is the reason for today’s discussion. Our esteemed Entertainment Reporter let me know that he has surpassed me in numbers of blogs on this site, but I assure you that situation will be remedied as well.

Tuesday began with the usual oatmeal breakfast, but I let it cook a bit too long and the resulting meal was a bit dry. In the future, I will have to keep a closer eye on it as it cooks. One of our long-time employees left us this week for greener pastures, so we celebrated and said good-bye with a festive lunch at a local establishment. Following lunch, we retreated back to the newsroom for a dessert, a wonderful raspberry, white chocolate torte cake from the Blue Iris in downtown Warren. In case you were wondering, that is an orchid blossom on top of the cake, Cymbidium, I believe. Since I had such a wonderful lunch and dessert, dinner was a simple stir-fry with vegetables and whole wheat pasta.