Thursday, March 24, 2011

Embracing a New Food Paradigm

On the back of my book, The Goddess of Raw Foods, I quote, The Revolution starts at the Dinner Table. And it does. When we transform our food paradigm, we transform not only our health and the health of our families and our communities, but we transform the health of the planet and its environment and we as well transform a global economy.

Food is our Medicine, not our poison and it should not be used as a weapon. It is the building block of all of human life. We eat food for nutritional reasons, but we also eat food for comfort, nourishment, and for social reasons. We gather around the dinner table and eat and socialize and its a way that human beings love and serve each other.

Food is an essential culture component of the human experience, but it has become a weapon of choice for many of us.

A revolutionary way of transforming your health and your health habits is to embrace a new food paradigm. What does that mean?

Well it means giving up the old food paradigm that dictates to us what is sufficient amounts of protein, what is a refined grain (as if Mother Nature herself didn't make our grains refined), what is the sufficient amount of caloric intake for our bodies, the fact that consuming milk from an animal and feeding it to our children is both insane and counter intuitive of the nutritional supremacy of a mother's breast milk and also of the fact that there are other ways to get milk like from nuts, seeds, and grains.

Embracing a New Food Paradigm also means perhaps eating seasonally, so eat the fruits and vegetables that are in season as this not only benefits your health and delights your palette as the fruits and vegetables that come up in that season are juicier, taste so much better, and contain the nutrients that the body craves for that season, but it also transforms an economy that offers its devalues the health and well-being of the consumer over dollars.

Embracing a New Food Paradigm calls for collective action on the part of conscious individuals who firmly believe and commit themselves to valuing their health and their natural environments over everything else. It also means creating meals differently. Eating watermelon for dinner and just having a bowl of papaya for breakfast is not only filling, but highly nutritious. There is not need to eat eggs from a chicken and sausage from a pig to feel full or to get your daily nutritional value.

Learning how to read labels and read between the lines is extremely important in embracing a new food paradigm as there is nobody better to be an authority on what you should be eating other than yourself. Of course, there are people like myself and others who have studied, researched, and experienced how food either heals or depletes the body, but you are the ultimate authority on that choice. So that means, your doctor who is only required to take one nutritional course the entire time he or she is in medical school even with a half a million dollar education is also not an authority on what you should be eating.

What you can do now as an individual is support small and local businesses like co-ops around the world who support small organic farmers and other food vendors who do not sacrifice the health of their consumers for the sake of a dollar.

Other ways you can embrace a new food paradigm is to eat only food that you recognize and can pronounce, buy only organic and/or local, learn how to grow food outdoors or in indoors, and
quit giving in to pleasure over your health and quit making excuses about how you can't give up chicken. You're grown.