Eat Real Food

My beautiful little girl had a rather nasty “incident” last week and broke a couple of bones in her arm. It was on the dreaded monkey bars and it was the last day of school term.

Being school holidays, we have used “the incident” as an opportunity to spend some quiet time doing the kind of activities that she loves - reading, painting (it was her left arm and she is right handed thank goodness!) and her favourite thing at the moment, making posters of all sorts of crazy things!

A while back she was inspired to write a Real Food Manifesto - she was not the first to do this; there are loads of them on the internet. But she saw one and decided to do her own. She then decided yesterday that it was time to update her manifesto and asked me if I would like her to do it in Find Your Natural Groove colours (greens and purples by the way). Of course I said yes please!

Here is what she came up with all by herself with no help from anyone. Notes underneath are mine but I’m sure she could have come up with something similar if pressed. How easy is my job - just taking my daughters hard work and turning it into a blog post!

Eadie’s Real Food Manifesto

Make sure to poo each day to clean up.

If you’re not pooing each day, you need a clean up. Pooing (or pooping) is our main method of detoxification. If it’s not happening each day at least once, then something is not right. Our bodies were built to eliminate waste daily. The type of food we eat which dictates the state of our intestinal flora (or good bowel bacteria) is the main catalyst to this happening or not. As a starting point, good bacteria are not fond of processed food (the bad guys love it though!). If your good bugs are not happy, neither will your digestion be. Look after your little internal farm and it will look after you!

Don’t go near GMO

We are the first generation involved in this major experiment. The genetic modification of foods is really quite a frightening prospect when you think about it. We evolved to eat food made by nature and our bodies understand exactly how to process natural foods that are specifically good for us as individuals. When we start messing around with genes, putting genes from one species into another or from an animal into a fruit or vegetable etc, our bodies don’t know what to do with it. It’s not natural. Do we store it in our fat deposits? Do we allow it to affect or compromise our immune system in some way? We just don’t know, nobody knows! And I for one don’t want myself, my family or you to be part of this trial. Eat certified organic which has to be non-gmo or look for labels that state the fact.

Trust meat, fruit and vegies

What can I say - Eat Real Food *! Organic if possible!

Never eat fast food

She’s nothing if not an idealist! We are lucky in that I have the time and interest to make almost everything we eat from scratch. Even our Friday night pizza’s are home made. I’m not trying to sound virtuous - I know our situation is unusual. We realise that this is not practical for all of you but if you do occasionally choose to eat take-away, choose wisely. Give the big guys a miss - sugar filled buns, grain fed feed lot beef patties, trans fats in the deep fryer oil for the chips, nuggets and fish, processed cheese, ham and just about everything in the pizza made with the cheapest ingredients they can buy. If you must eat fast food sometimes, be discerning about your supplier - Japanese, Thai, Indian, quality gourmet pizza are some places to start but anyone can make poor quality food with poor quality ingredients and then sell it to you.

Grow your own crops

Yes and we have a vegie garden too and a few fruit trees. They all need work but they are wonderful to have and we know exactly what has been put on them. We only use organic fertilisers and composts and use companion planting and other non - chemical sources of pest control. If you have the space, grow some vegies. It’s great to go outside and pick your dinner!

Go for natural foods

Yep - Eat Real Foods *!

Drink rainwater

We have a rainwater tank so we are lucky but if you don’t have access to one or for that matter, one that you feel comfortable drinking from, then drink clean filtered or spring water whenever possible - all the time ideally. Almost every public water supply has chlorine added (for mostly good reason) and most have fluoride added because it has been decided that this is good for our teeth and that we need mass medication. The jury is out on the fluoride situation - some say it does more harm than good and with the research I’ve done, I sit in that camp too. It is quite complex to explain the whole situation in the context of the little article but chlorine and especially fluoride (the lighter of the two) are similar in chemical structure to iodine and compete with iodine (which we do need) for uptake in our systems. Our thyroid needs iodine and when it can’t be taken up because fluoride and chlorine are hogging our receptor sites this can mean big trouble. Aside from drinking clean filtered water, seaweeds are high in iodine and adding some such as kombu, wakame and dulse to your cooking can increase your iodine intake and help it to compete with chlorine and fluoride. By the way, most water filters don’t remove fluoride as the molecules are too small - check your filter.

Try to avoid white sugar

We have talked about this in a previous post. It’s sound advice! She obviously reads my stuff!

Rarely go to unhealthy foods

That’s my girl! Let’s work on the 80/20 rule - better still 90% healthy 10% free for all! Once you’ve been “rarely going to unhealthy foods” for a while, your body will let you know when you’ve done something it doesn’t like and you’ll be inclined to do it less often.

Eat protein each day

You need protein to build muscle that has been broken down from your bodies general day to day functioning and is especially needed when you exert yourself with exercise or hard physical work. You need protein to grow skin, hair, nails and bones. Protein is used to make enzymes to help digestion and to make chemicals inside the body. It’s a component of blood and in fact every cell in your body. It’s really important stuff. Like the lady says, eat protein each day!

Don’t eat vegetable oil

Ok, she’s given me an opportunity to plug my up coming book Natural Ways to turn Moody Kids into Happy Kids. Here’s a quote from it:

For the last 40 years or so, we have been led to believe that polyunsaturated vegetable oils are healthy fats and saturated fats are bad for us. The problem with this theory is that so many so called vegetable oils (actually they are seed oils!) including sunflower, Canola, safflower, soybean, rice bran, grape seed and corn oils, contain lots of inflammation causing omega- 6 fatty acids - more on that on page 12.
Most vegetable oils are processed using petrochemical extraction and stored in clear plastic bottles under bright supermarket lights which makes them more or less destabilised before we even get them home. So it’s not hard to see why these oils aren’t so good for us. These seed oils weren’t available thousands of years ago and the processing methods used to make them certainly weren’t, so our bodies really aren’t equipped to deal with them.

Make fresh food

Make fresh food from fresh food. Don’t use processed or packaged foods unless you absolutely have too and you have thoroughly checked the ingredients list for harmful additives. Eat Real Food *

Avoid Gluten

We are not gluten fans in our house. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley and rye and it has the ability in simple terms, to bore holes through your intestinal walls. It is of course, much more complex than that but suffice to say, intestinal permeability otherwise known as leaky gut is a problem that many of us have and is very often caused by an over exposure to gluten. There are plenty of experts who suggest that the cause of many autoimmune diseases is a compromised immune system caused by intestinal permeability. Once again in very simple terms, your immune system goes off fighting all the bits and pieces of food and matter that it identifies as foreign that leak through the gut wall, gets overworked and starts attacking itself.

Eating gluten containing food makes me want to go to sleep, it gives others stomach cramps and pain, IBS symptoms, digestive issues and muscle pain. It can cause anemia, headaches, brain fog and so many other symptoms. And they are just the warning signs of something more on the horizon if you don’t clean up your act. If you want to know more about gluten and why this situation has come about, please read this article on modern wheat and how it has changed in recent years.

Love your life

She’s a clever girl! It’s all about your attitude really!

Eat a rainbow

Like I said, she’s a clever girl! A rainbow of colour from a variety of Real Foods* especially vegies and fruits.

Eat quality fats

We have spent the last 40 years starving our bodies of high quality fats. Demonising fat has become the norm but every cell wall in our body is made of fat and our brain is made of around 70% fat. Is it any wonder the incidence of depression, headaches, migraine and behavioral problems are so high. Our poor brains are starving! High quality fat are found in coconut oil, grass fed and finished meat and poultry, wild caught fish and shell fish, avocados, eggs, cream, butter and full fat dairy, nuts and seeds and cold pressed oils. Don’t skimp on quality fat in your diet if you want to be healthy and lean. Avoid trans fats and commercial vegetable oils like the plague.

By the way, your body is smart! Its really hard to overeat fat as you get full very quickly and stay that way for a long time.

And love being healthy!

It’s the best feeling!

* Eat Real Food - Anything non processed, non packaged, grown fresh the way nature intended, not made in a factory, containing no additives to increase it’s shelf life or to make it look more colourful or flavourful or more morish.