Happy Healthy Gut by Jennifer Browne

Author:Jennifer Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626360419
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2013-12-23T16:00:00+00:00

Try and substitute refined, white sugar for something like brown rice syrup or agave syrup. They are lower on the glycemic index, and won’t make your body work overtime.

The Past and the Present: What has Changed?

On several different occasions, I’ve had an acquaintance or two feel the need to point out to me that human beings have always eaten meat, and we are now unhealthier than ever before, in the midst of the current “health movement.” In other words, there must be a correlation between the recently increased interest in health (in which a vegetarian diet has increasingly become more common), and the higher rates of disease than ever before.

Well, there is.

Only a hundred years ago, humans were dying for much different reasons. Things like bacterial infections, substandard hygiene, lack of antibiotics, childbirth complications, and diseases that are now preventable due to routine immunizations, were a few common ways to bite the dust. In present-day USA, none of these reasons are common anymore. The leading cause of death today is heart disease, something that can easily be traced back to our dietary choices. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, and obesity are all strong indicators of imminent heart disease. What do we do to lower those numbers? Eat less animal products (less saturated fat), and more vegetables. This super simple tweak would make huge strides in the direction of better health.

Back in the day (I’m still talking a hundred years ago; circa 1914), people grew their own vegetables, raised and slaughtered their own pigs, milked their own cows, and collected eggs from their own hens. The food was local, fresh, and free of today’s antibiotics, hormones, GMOs, pesticides and herbicides. In other words, the chemical cocktail of today’s food was non-existent, and so the quality was comparatively outstanding. The portions were also much smaller. These people had diets that were not primarily composed of processed foods, soda, fast food, bleached flour, or foods heavily laden with refined sugar and table salt. Of course they were healthier!

Today, our food rarely originates from the same cities we reside in, and an apple infused with pesticides and harvested two seasons ago is made far more available to us than an organic one, grown in our neighbourhoods, and harvested last week. That’s messed up!

In the past, people used to work long, hard days on their own land, or land that was at least very close by. They used to do an incredible amount of manual labour, walk a lot more, and spend way more time outdoors. In comparison, in 2009, Americans commuted an average of fifty minutes a day.198 We currently watch an average of four hours of television a day.199 That amounts to about five hours a day sitting on our butts, not to mention those who sit for their forty-hour-a-week jobs, or actually take time to sit and eat dinner.

The quality of our food and the amount of activity we do is diminishing, and so is our health. We need to remember that although food keeps us alive, it’s the quality of our food that determines for how long.

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