Anti-Foods

"If you want to live a long, healthy, vibrant life, then you will have to eat life-giving foods." (The Eat-Clean Diet, Tosca Reno)

This excerpt from her book is worth taking a few minutes to read. Trust me.

(begin excerpt!)

Dead Food/Living Food
Processed, chemically charged, sugar-fortified, partially hydrogenated foods are more common than ever and it's easy to see why eating these pseudo-foods does nothing to improve the length and quality of your life. In fact, the effect is quite the opposite. Lately, such foods have been called "dead foods" or as I like to call them, anti-foods.

Foods that have had their natural nutrition removed and have then been subjected to refining, processing and further manufacturing lose whatever potential they originally possessed. Now throw in a few chemicals to increase shelf life and seduce the customer with added sugar, salt and hydrogenated fats (to make you think this stuff tastes good), and you are left with marginally beneficial anti-foods. These are dead foods. Agri-business spends a lot of money marketing such foods, and if you're like most North Americans, it's what you buy. It's fast, it's readily available, it's cheap and it's everywhere. If we don't think too much, that's what we feed our families and ourselves. It's a slippery slope once you begin to lean on such nutrient-devoid foods.

Eat Live Food
Contrast anti-foods with fresh, still-living produce. When you pick a fresh head of lettuce it is actually still alive, nutrients bursting through it's leaves. Most fresh produce is living. If you allow a potato to grow an eye and then plant it, a potato plant will grow. If you take the seeds from your tomato and put them in the soil, you could grow a tomato plant. If you throw peels and flesh in the compost, every last bit will be broken down to nourish the earth.

Try that with a Twinkie! The thing will still be sitting there, "good" as new, weeks later. Now imagine what happens when you put that Twinkie in your body. Your mouth and stomach do their job and break it down, but then what? When your body encounters a molecule of polysorbate 60, otherwise known as polyoxyethylene (20) sorbitan monostearate (a common ingredient in processed foods such as the Twinkie), what will it do with it? In what way will that molecule aid in the health and longevity of your cells?

Your body has no idea what to do with many of the chemicals common in foods today, but the body is pretty smart, so it has a storage mechanism planned to deal with the unexpected. When it can't figure out what to do with such molecules, it finds a fat cell in your body in which to store them. the more you eat anti-foods, the more fat you will have and that fat becomes a literal waste dump for the body's unrecognizable chemicals. No wonder your long-term health is affected so negatively.

When you eat Clean foods, your body breaks down and uses every single molecule. Every one! Each one of those molecules makes it to some place in your body where it does something for your health. Protein molecules go to building and repairing tissue. Healthy fat molecules assist with lubricating cells and keeping hair, skin and other organs healthy. Molecules from complex carbohydrates provide usable energy. Fiber cleans out your system. Water carries the nutrients through your body. Mom was right - you really are what you eat!

If you want to live a long, healthy, vibrant life, then you will have to eat life-giving foods. That means foods as close to their natural state as possible...Clean foods.

(end of excerpt!)

Pretty profound, huh? Yep.