Nutrition: Grow Your Own

All the nutrition our bodies require comes from the food we eat or at least the food we should be eating. I am referring to real food, fresh vegetables, fruits, grains as well as meats, fish and chicken. These foods to be healthy must be organic and to be fresh need to be grown or produced as close to your kitchen as possible.

Peas, for example, are a common and relatively easy vegetable to grow. According to Dr. Decuypere's Nutrient Charts^™~~ Vegetables Chart ~,

one cup of boiled peas with no salt added contains 8.58 grams of protein, 134 calories and 8.8 grams of fiber. Peas also contain calcium (43mg), iron (2.46 mg), zinc (1.9mg) as well as the vitamins A, C, B1, B2, B6, and others.

If you are not eating real food at all your meals each day you may need to use a nutritional supplement to make sure your brain and body get the vitamins and minerals, including the trace minerals, required each day. Trace minerals include iron, manganese, copper, iodine, zinc, cobalt, fluoride, and selenium.

You can grow your own nutritional sources on your balcony, in your backyard or in a community garden plot. Chance are unless you have the time and space you will need to purchase a considerable amount of your food from another source. As best you can buy this food from a source that is as close to your home as possible. The closer the supplier is to yoru home the fresher the food will be.

Fresh vegetables, fruit, and beans for example are not excessively packed and labeled. When it comes to vegetables I make two recommendations, eat what is in season, it is usually cheaper and embrace root vegetables, beets, potatoes, carrots, turnips and parsnips to name some.

Ideally you want to purchase food that is both produced locally and produced organically. This way you are not consuming any artificial chemcails when you sit down to dinner.

In his book “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” Michael Pollan advises us to “Eat food, not too much and mostly plants.” This is sound advice. Food is our natural source of the nutrients we need.

If the food we buy at the grocery store is not providing us with what we need to eb healthy we need to do more than take supplements to make up for the food’s failing we need to grow as much of our own food as we can and we need to support those who are growing food in and near our cities towns and villages.

Food is life and to allow it to become degraded and do anything is a very dangerous course to follow.