Doctors, nutritionists and dieticians tell us what we eat and how we prepare our food can affect how we look, how we feel, and how long we live.
The truth is, most health conscious folks understand enough about healthy eating and nutrition to know the right things to buy and what to eat. The problem is that, we then cook it in all the wrong ways and lose too many nutrients. What is the point in eating even the right foods, or spending all that money on organic foods, if you are going to lose most of the nutrition while cooking?
We are a generation that eats with our eyes, but digest with our stomachs. The body is only looking for nutrition. I always say if the body had its own radio station, it would be called “WIFM”, that is, “What’s in it for me?” The body does not care about taste or smell, the body only cares about getting vitamins and minerals out of the food.
The nutrients in the food we eat, is what helps strengthen our immune system. Our immune system is what fights off any and everything from common cold to cancer. And the only thing that can strengthen our immune system is the nutrition in the foods we eat.
I tell people that they do not need to completely stop the things they like to eat, or to stop eating out. The key is just to prepare and cook it in a healthier way to maximise the nutrition and minimise the fat. This greatly reduces the risk of contracting any of these diseases without changing the things you eat now.
So why are all these health problems rampant? Where did all the nutrition go?
Most families can unconsciously lose nutrition in their foods, just by the way they prepare and cook alone. This can amount to a lot of nutrients, vitamins and minerals losses.
The top 6 main killers of nutrition are:
- Peeling foods that grow under the ground.
- Cooking with water. Any foods that have natural juices in them should not be cooked with any water.
- Cooking on high heat. When you cook vegetables above 90 degrees centigrade, the nutrition in the food is largely destroyed. Boiling temperature (100 degrees centigrade) is too high for most foods and kills nutrition further. Steaming for more than two or three minutes, grilling, roasting, microwave ovens are also forms of excessive heat.
- Oxidation is a further problem. It is the effect of air and light on foods – and air and light gets into our foods easily while cooking.
- Cooking or frying with fats and oils. Fats and oils make our foods seven to eight times harder to digest, and they give us those extra inches we spend so much time trying to lose.
- Ordinary pots and pans. Cooking with conventional pots and pans like aluminium, teflon non stick, ordinary stainless steel leaches heavy metals into food every time you cook in them. The metals in the pans react with the enzymes in your food and they go into the body. Surely that can’t be good for the body. They build up can contribute to health problems like Alzheimer’s.
If you care about your health, it is time to start minimising fats and oils in your diet (or better still cut them out), and start taking steps to maximise the nutrition in your foods while preparing your meals. This can be done by cooking foods that have natural juices without any water, cooking on medium and low heat only, cutting out fats and oils, getting good quality cookware, and minimising oxidation attacks (air and light). It changed my life and my family’s, it will change yours forever
