THE MYTH ABOUT OUR FOOD..

Last weekends, I had a good chat with my mom about nutrition..(of all things.. hehe). After reading a book about Vita Nutrient Solution, I am now despite my lack of formal education on nutrition, better informed on the benefits of nutrition on our body. My mom, being a nurse since I wasn't even born, knows quite a lot on the topic. I would say that I now feel much older because me and my mom can talk like we're friends. :D

My brother just had an accident from playing basketball in one of those tournament that he go to so often. In fact, it was his second major accident. The first one, his lower leg bone cracked and pierced out of his skin and just recently, he had concussion, bruised his back and backbone and hand. My brother is tall relatively yet skinny. Typical Malay body. Well, that makes me at a few inches shorter than him and quite erm..'firm-body' not typical.. hehehe.

Anyway, my point was, I wonder if his post-accident injuries are because he had a massive real accident or can it be prevented if only he were more muscular (or maybe just more meat to cover those bones), or maybe if he had such accidents in the future, would he recover faster if he were to have stronger bones that will not crack easily like his did or at least recover faster. If basketball is this nasty to him, I wonder what happen in games like rugby where physical contact is 'the' key to these so-called gentleman game. I am real worried about him especially that he's supposed to be taking his SPM this year. I finally managed to persuade him to take supplements so that he can recover faster and hopefully his brain will not be affected.

Assumably, most people would realize that our body needs optimum nutrition to ensure optimum performance. Obviously without adequate nutrition, we still would be able to go about our everyday life. But many of us, if only we be truthful to ourselves, are physically nowhere our optimum level. The everyday food that we eat, as my mom quote it, are like 'garbage'. Many of our carbohydrates were produced in inorganic soil with little minerals and nutritional value that our body needs. From my readings, I found that vegetable were picked before they are ripe and then were treated with sulfites and other chemical to give the appearance that it is fresh but it is neither taste the same nor have the nutritional value it supposed to have.

Now that our fresh fruits and vegetables are not that fresh, what would we expect from processed, canned or worst, refined food? Almost every effort to do anything to these so-called fresh food will deprive the food from its nutritional value. It can be as industrialized as canning or as simple as slicing and dicing or freezing and thawing. Then we'll cook the food under heat, and then it gets reheat. By the time we eat the food, about 80-95 percent of the food is already lost.

All this while, I have never thought of carbohydrates and sugar as something that can be the cause of obesity. Most people would say that fat are the cause of obesity. That explains the craze of low fat food diet throughout the globe. But what many don't want to emphasize is, (eventhough I recall being taught about this in secondary school) carbohydrates that wasn't used by our body will be turned to fat anyway. Sugar as something that we take in huge amount on daily basis is 100% carbohydrates without any trace of vitamins and minerals. Refined carbohydrates like flour, which is then turned into the food that we eat most like cereals, cread, pasta because it is labelled 'healthy'. Unless of course if we can get hold of those rare brown rice or any type of whole grain food produce. Don't kid me, we don't eat such food very often.

Lately, many diet has changed its focus to a low carb, high protein and moderate to high fat. This revolution was started by Dr. Atkin with his famous Atkin's Diet. His diet might be especially revolutionized to those with super overweight problem and has little self-restrained ability to follow other conventional diet system. For many of us that is not super-obese, or only about a few pounds or kilos above our desirable weight, and has always been able to eat proportionately, his notion on extremely low carb, high protein and high fat might seem out of this world. However, it is not that kind of diet that attract me most about his works. It is the notion that realizing it or not, many of us, even under the so-called healthy diet is eating too much of the so-called healthy carbo with extreme number of sugar intake, not enough vitamins and minerals and nowhere with balanced amount of protein at all.

With a wide usage of pesticides and chemicals in our food, our body needs more nutrients that work as antioxidants to detoxify our body. Vitamins like Vit A, C and E are the antioxidants that our body need mainly. Now that we have established that most food that we eat everyday is not nutritionally enough for our body performance, the next thing to do would be to turn to supplement to ensure that our body gets the nutrient that it needs. In many cases, supplement would not be to supple our body with additional nutrients. Instead, supplement has become ESSENTIAL.

Of course many of us would say just because supplement are not natural, we're not supposed to be dependent on them too much. Well, firstly, our body reacts well to the vitamins that we take in the form of multivitamins (Vit A, B, C, D, E, K, calcium, magnesium, etc). The only thing that most experts would agree on is taking beta carotene in its natural form instead of synthetic. Then there is also the acid amino supplement that many athletes especially bodybuilder would take because again, most of us who've taken biology or science in school would know how important protein is to maintain, replace our body cells.

If many of us are skeptic about eating pills of supplements, try getting the facts on drugs right. True, many of the health problem can be solved with taking prescribed drugs but at the cost of a lot of toxin in our body. To detoxify the toxin, guess what we need? MORE ANTIOXIDANT : vitamin A, C and E. True, some (but not all) nutrients can be produced by our body but as we get older, our body ability to produce them are lower.

Supplements are taken to ensure optimum nutrients in our body for optimum performance. Despite what people might think, supplements are not drugs and even with high doses, have NO adverse affect to our body as many drugs would. Supplements are meant to prevent illnesses and maintain health but drugs are meant to cure (although Dr Atkin would really maintain that supplements can cure as well). What do we like better? Proactive or reactive? I choose proactive, with God's willing...