How to judge food is good for you?

Searching for Right Food that is healthy
"Monkey see, monkey do", this is my simple philosophy that I have discovered over the years for judging food that are good for us. If you are in forties or higher, it is highly possible that you always looking for including healthy diet in you menu. But finding the right food for your body is not easy. Yet through science and honest reasoning, one can come with some conclusions about right food that may be surprising and probably true. At least such reasoning has worked for me and helped control my blood pressure and prevent serious diseases. I am reasonably sure, it will work for others. Just to let you know that I had dizziness and high blood pressure for almost seven years. I still take blood pressure medicine but seem to have discovered the art of selecting food and exercise that has helped me control the blood pressure and hopeful that I will eventually get rid of high blood pressure. I will focus only on judging the food and discuss about exercise later or motivational aspects of eating the recommended food later.

We live in an age where our food or nutrient intake is primarily influenced by advertisements (ironically this page also have a few!) that comes from companies that sell processed foods, fast food (Dunkin' Donuts, Mc Donald or Burger King), tasty but expensive foods (restaurants), or medicine (Pharmaceuticals). Some of the advertisements are good. But advertisements overwhelming are made for profiting from you rather than concern for your health. This is indicated by facts that 2 in 3 Americans are overweight and 1 in 5 Americans are obese - a number that has doubled in last 30 years. Obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes have reached epidemic proportions. Quite a sad statistics from a wonderful country. But China and India are also catching up very fast, mainly because they can afford to eat bad foods found in restaurants and fast food-chain.

One cannot blame the advertisements alone. Cultural foods also has big impact in ruining one's health. Perhaps the first mistake humankind made since pre-historic times was to have salt added to our diet; ever since then the diet has gone downhill! Some Japanese and Mediterranean food are close to ideal food as indicated by their longevity and good health.

Finding the baseline for good health?
So how do we judge which nutrition is good for us? I have gradually realized that resorting to simple scientific theory of evolution provides most of my answers. Many of us may not be pleased by the idea of evolution theory, but let us temporarily believe in it, for the sake of our health. (May be in some other article, I will try to convince that it is not really against religious principles!).

Based on evolution theory, our body makeup is similar to a monkey or a chimpanzee. Since the monkeys in the wild are not obese or have generally have tooth decay, we should be able to get good insight by looking at the lifestyle of monkeys, and see what wrong steps we have taken through the generations and possibly correct it.

Some of the observations are:

• Activity: Monkeys get plenty of exercise by foraging for food for most of the day, where by they move most parts of their body. On the contrary, our job in the urban and sub-urban area requires us to stand for long hours, or repetitively move only some parts of the body, or worse, sit for the whole day in a cubicle.
• Diet: Their diet consist of fruits, nuts, tender leaves, flowers, on rare occasions some meat and no sugar or salt. Our diet is just the opposite with fried foods, lots of meat, sugar laden drinks, enriched food - polished rice, pasta, white bread, fruit juice, and beverages like coffee and tea.
• Eating in Moderation: Monkeys will not stuff themselves as they have to work for getting extra leaves or fruits. Imagine how motivated you will be if you have to climb another tree to get same kind of fruit or leaves! On the contrary, we have the option to go to various restaurants - Italian, Chinese, Indian, or Japanese - with an easy car ride. Then stuff more with desserts.
• Fasting: On some dreary days monkey go hungry, yet they are fairly active. For us we normally eat three times a day with snacks in between.

Baseline For Healthy Food
So based from above facts we can make the following conclusion about base line food.

• Very less Salt: Just like animals we can get all the salt from fruit and vegetables. So we can give up or use very sparingly


• Very less sugar: Sugar is a processed food and like any process food it must be avoided. One of the obvious dangers that is the damage it does to the teeth. Animals do not brush there teeth and still they do not have tooth decay. Yet there are other dangers that cannot be seen but realised only when you go to doctor with problem when it too late. A google search on "sugar poison" will show you what I mean. The danger is felt when one gets diabetes. If diabetics can live without sugar for rest of their lives, so can other before we have diabetes.


• Very few processed foods: You will be surprised how many foods are processed. Some examples are sugar, pasta, polished rice, white bread, any thing made from white flour. Food made from white flour are densely packed starch without fiber to moderate the absorption into your blood stream. Scientifically speaking, food that are absorbed fast are high glycemic foods which should be avoided. As a result the blood sugar shoots into your system before your body can control it via insulin. The result is over the years, the body gets de-sensitized to the insulin and people get diabetes. Usually people get diabetes when they are in sixties, but nower days it is common in forties. In fact in USA and other countries the doctors are the considering the diabetes growing at an epidemic proportions. All because of processed foods! Animal's diet do not have high starch diet, usually their diet has good balance of fiber, complex carbohydrate that takes longer to digest.


• Use Caution in Eating Prepared foods: Whether you buy prepared food from market, or from fast food chain or restaurants. Use caution as they are make most of the stuff from white flour, sugar, salt and "bad" fats. The only food, in my opinion, that I found best to eat in all the restaurants or fast food is Subway's - whole bread veggie delite (without any sugary drink!). Can you believe it, only one item! Of course, salad without those creamy dressing is another. The food industry has lot more to do that fits the bill of ideal food. So I would recommend to eat home cooked food and completely avoid food from outside! Believe me, you will never find my advice in any place because it has potential to ruin economy of all the fast food and restaurants! But customer have to dictate and send the message to restaurants and fast-food chain to include many of the healthy items.


• Mimize drinking of Juice: At the first glance, it sounds very healthy as it is pure and natural. But in nature animals do not drink fruit juice. The point is, say, it is easy to gulp one or two glass of orange juice, but will you really eat if your have five-six oranges kept in front of you? Even if you eat, you will eat at much slower place than gulping the juice. Remember the animals do not use knife to cut the fruits too :), so the motivation is far less to eat the orange! Secondly, the juice contains sugar without the pulp that contains fibers slowing the digestion.
• Avoiding fats, especially bad fats: One can easily see monkey's food is all raw and have no fried foods. It may be impossible to have all raw food, but we should be close to the spirit of it. Did you know that vegetable foods have no cholesterol and have no bad fats. One should avoid eating meat altogether as it is the source of bad fats and cholesterol. Also avoid processed vegetable oil or partially hydrogenated fats. Recently, KFC food was accused of dripping with such kind of unhealthy fat.
• Health Pills: We need to be vary of all the non-prescription pills in the market. You never know what is in them. Though a multi-vitamin pill is may be very good for you. It is very easy to make bad decision when you are in desperate state. Though herbal pills claim that there are not side effects, a large dosage of any thing may be harmful to you. I had seen a lady to used to eat almost 8-10 pills of different herbal supplements!
• Eating Less and often: Animals do not get to eat the tasty fried foods, so overeating is never a problem! Once you realize this and reduce your food intake, you will be surprised that eating less can be so good for you. You might always feel hungry but you will learn to live with eating food in moderation, once the food is deprived of salt, sugar or fat.

Summary
I tried to give you some advice in making judgments in selecting good and bad food. These will definitely help you in fighting hypertension and diabetes. You will definitely have to change your lifestyle, I will say "resetting" your lifestyle that has been so corrupted by enticing advertisements. I do not claim to follow my own advice, but I know the baseline and have a goal in my mind. But this has greatly helped my health in a good way and I wanted to share with you.

I hope you read my other articles in this blog, which will contain good information that will help you change your life for the better.