Let Food Be Your Medicine

Food consumes us: advertisements for food, dieting plans, pictures of food, articles about food, books and magazines with recipes for food. Phone apps for buying food, storing food, counting calories from our food, or cooking food also abound. We are inundated with foodstuff!

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For thousands of years, our ancestors struggled to find enough food to survive. Native Americans followed the buffalo across the plains, sustaining their families with the meat, hides, and fat of the noble herds. During the middle ages, the invention of the iron plow, the horse collar, and horseshoes allowed people to farm the wet, heavy soil of northern Europe. This brought about a population boom. As people ate better, they became more fertile; and mortality rates for infants and children declined. When the potato blight hit Ireland, millions died of starvation, and millions more emigrated just to be able to eat.

We don’t have that problem in the United States today. Modern agricultural methods combined with a global economy give most Americans access to plenty of food. With that great gift comes responsibility to choose our foods wisely. Unfortunately, most of us haven’t been educated about what real food is, and how food can make or break our health.

What is real food?

Real food is simple. It is unaltered by humans. When humans alter food, they create products that stress the body instead of nourishing it. Plants are natural. They sustain our bodies with vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients. When humans spray pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides on plants, the results cause stress to our bodies. When humans create genetically modified “foods” in a laboratory, it causes stress to the body. Animals roaming around eating grass, bugs, or worms are natural. When humans cage those animals, pump them full of hormones and antibiotics, and feed them grains and the litter from other animals, then those meat and dairy products begin to stress the human body.