Let food be your medicine

1. Eliminate Processed Food
Processed food is, broadly, anything in a package. More specifically, it is anything with a long, unpronounceable ingredient list, and even more rigidly, it contains processed/hydrogenated vegetable oils, preservatives, dyes, sugars. Processed food is processed so that it has a long shelf-life.

• Refined carbs/flour-Flour, the way most people eat it, is bad for health for (at least) these reasons: it promotes unstable blood sugar, it contains genetically modified (and thus pesticide treated) grains, and/or it contains allergenic grains. When some people eat high glycaemic index foods like bread, their pancreas is stimulated to release insulin at levels that end up plummeting blood sugar. The experience of transient hypoglycaemia is one of discomfort and anxiety – jitteriness, nausea, irritability, brain-cloudiness, and fatigue – and the short-term antidote is often more of the causative agent.
• Allergens-Gluten, soy, and corn have been identified as allergenic foods, and a leading speculation as to how these foods became and are becoming more allergenic is the nature of their processing and genetic modification rendering them unrecognisable to our immune systems and vehicles of not so healthy information. Gluten (and processed dairy), when incompletely digested, result in peptides that, once through the gut barrier can stimulate the brain and immune system in inflammatory ways.
• Sugar-It’s in almost every packaged food. Get in to the habit of reading labels. It may come with different labels – cane sugar, crystalline fructose, high fructose corn syrup – but its all sugar. The way the body handles fructose and glucose is different; however, which may account for why fructose is 7 times more likely to result in glycation end products or sticky protein clumps that cause inflammation. This also causes skin wrinkling and is one of the major causes of skin ageing.

2. Eat Whole Food

• All natural fats-The polyunsaturated fats, omega 3s, have gotten their share of well-deserved positive press because of what fish and fish oil (EPA and DHA) can do to promote anti-inflammatory mediators, cell membrane fluidity, and counter the effects of vegetable oils in our diets. They don’t act alone; however. It is tempting to assign foods to different fat groups, but many fats present together. For example, grass-fed beef is not a “saturated” fat. It is actually primarily monounsaturated fat. Nonetheless, saturated fats are critical to cell membrane health and a brain that is 60% lipid by dry weight.
• b. Probiotics-All traditional cultures fermented their foods, lived in and with nature, and ate from it in a way that promoted a now endangered diversity of gut microbes. Medication, sedentary lifestyle, stress, and processed diet contribute to deleterious changes in our flora. We can get probiotics naturally through foods like lacto-fermented sauerkraut, pickles and by protecting what we have naturally by minimising toxic exposures. Most recently, research has implicated pesticides in the disruption of our beneficial bacteria.