The secret of reversing disease, is changing your genes. And that doesn't mean wearing Levi's instead of Gap jeans, or picking new parents, or splicing in some new recombinant gene into your genetic code to unclog your arteries or reverse cancer growth. It means recognizing that absolutely everything you do interacts with your genes and literally changes the way they are "read" or expressed. Health is the result of your genes expressing themselves well. Disease is the result of poorly expressed genes. The way that food talks to your genes and controls your health is called nutrigenomics. The quality of the food you choose to eat is probably the most important thing you do every day to control your genes. How and what you eat determines which genes are turned on and off. It matters whether you eat whole, real food, or processed, high-sugar, and high-fat food. It matters whether your diet contains phytochemicals or toxic chemicals. And it matters whether the way you eat balances your blood sugar or causes swings in blood There is a spectrum of choices for being healthy and feeling well. A little chocolate or a few cookies or some great ice cream is not what's going to kill you or make you sick. It is the overall way we eat and live.
Have you eaten your 60 servings of spinach today?
You’d have to eat that much in order to get the same amount
of iron you would have gotten from one serving of spinach
grown in 1948. And you’d have to eat 25 cups to get
even the measly RDA of vitamin E. Modern agricultural
techniques are the culprits. The fruits and vegetables on
today’s supermarket shelves come from nutrient-poor soil
grown on chemical fertilizers and sprayed with pesticides.
Not to mention genetically modified produce, which farmers
aren’t required to label.
What’s more, in order to get these foods to the store before
they start to rot, commercial growers harvest fruits and
vegetables before they’ve had time to ripen. (You’ve noticed
how bananas in the produce aisle are green when you buy
them.) Apples have been in cold storage for months before
hitting the shelves.
Before the onset of industrial agriculture, farmers relied
on natural fertilizers to grow their produce. In order to
insure freshness, grocers bought foodstuffs from local
farmers, so the fruits and vegetables available to Americans
decades ago had time to ripen in the sun naturally - so
yesteryear’s produce contained much higher levels of
vitamins, minerals, and other natural compounds essential to
your health.
What can you do about it? One simple way to go is to buy
local organically grown fruits and vegetables whenever
possible. Not only will you avoid pesticides and other
chemicals – you’ll get a lot more of Nature’s beneficial
ingredients.
The science backs me up on this. A recent study published in
The Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry found
that organic tomatoes contain almost twice as much of an
important type of compound – called “flavonoids” – as
conventionally grown tomatoes. And the
blueberries on my back hill are crammed with 60% more of the
nutrition that matters.
Flavonoids are naturally occurring anti-oxidants found in a
number of plants, including tomatoes, blueberries, grapes,
and green tea. The benefits of anti-oxidants cannot be
overstated. Here are just a few of the benef
its linked to flavonoids:
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