Monday, January 2, 2012

Clean Eating Core Tenent #1 - Eating Naturally

     Clean Eating is multiple nutrition "guidelines" that come together seamlessly to form a healthy, nutritious diet - as humans were meant to eat. Drinking a lot of water daily, monitoring additional intake of sugars and sodium, and removing processed foods from your diet - all of these are essential components of Clean Eating. 



     By removing foods that are processed and don't naturally occur in Nature from your diet, you are by default keeping your daily intake of food to be among those naturally produced by the Earth: fruits, vegetables, nuts, berries, grains, dairy, meats from animals, and seafood. There is sound scientific and logical fact to support the theory that removing processed foods from your diet will promote optimum health : genetics and evolution. Regardless of your religious beliefs - your body processes foods that have been around for thousands of years - not ones made in a factory or "invented" within the last 50 years. It has not adapted to process Pop*Tarts, nor will it ever as these are not a naturally occurring food. They were first produced in the early 1960's, making them a blink in the eye of the evolution of the human food chain.  Your body "sees" processed foods as low grade, low quality, and not wholesome.

     Fruits, vegetables, meats - these are the foods that your genetic structure as a human being recognizes as nutrition. Religious or Atheist views aside, you can't deny that human bodies were created ( in one way or the other ) to process fruits, vegetables, nuts, meats - that which the Earth produces and are not man made. These are the foods your digestive system was created to process. These are the foods your body has evolved to process.

     Eating close to Nature means eating foods as close to how they naturally appear in Nature as possible. While I don't care to eat raw meat and unpasteurized milk, eating grains with the wheat germ intact ( a "whole grain" ) and eating fruits and vegetables with as little cooking as possible ( to keep the inherent nutrients as intact as possible Microwaving vegetables versus boiling... ) is the right way to go to accomplish a Clean Eating lifestyle.