Dietary Dilemmas!

Why do you choose to eat the foods that you do?
The recommended dietary intake (RDI) was originally calculated to ensure that deficiency-based diseases were avoided, not as suggestions for optimal nutritional requirements, and yet, the basic RDI is still not met by the diets of many people.
The diets that people follow vary immensely, for many reasons, some valid, some hype-driven, some conditioned and so on. The important thing to always remember is that we need specific nutrients every day to be healthy. Just as your car’s performance would be affected if given poor quality fuel, so is our body quickly affected by the foods that we eat.

Many folk today choose a diet based purely upon convenience, tending to grab anything that is quick or handy, trusting (or hoping) blindly that their body is getting the nutrition that it needs. We live in a rapid-fire world and the pace just keeps on getting faster. To stop several times a day and actually spend time preparing and consuming food that has actually had some thought go into it, is considered time-wasting for many who live in this driven society.

Perhaps taste is your primary concern, a slave to constant cravings for delicacies that you know are bad for you as you willingly give in to your sweet and fatty snacks? Do you constantly have biscuits, ice-cream, chocolate, or cake on hand to meet the desire whenever it arises, blissfully ignoring the fact that with each successive weakening the cravings grow stronger, the succumbing more frequent and your waistline ever expanding?

Vegetarianism is a way of eating, which is followed in a variety of forms, from the true vegetarian or vegan choosing to totally avoid animal products, to the ovo-lacto-vegetarians, eating eggs and dairy products but avoiding meat, to the even more inclusive fish-eating vegetarians. Some make an ethical or moral decision not to eat certain foods, consciously respecting the rights of animals to live and be treated humanely, whilst others make the decision for religious or health reasons. Whatever your reasons, the significant nutritional holes left in such a diet must be properly compensated for via alternative sources.

The Zone diet proposes to ameliorate most of our health problems and give us an energy boost by balancing our proteins, carbohydrates and fats, thus controlling errant blood sugar and insulin levels – one of the biggest threats to health in the western world.

What blood type are you? This is the key point behind The Blood Type Diet, with tiny molecules called “lectins” altering everything from inflammatory processes, to toxicity, to bowel function, to cancer progression and incidence.

Ayurvedic Medicine is the oldest and most comprehensively structured medical system in the world, from which all other forms of medicine have sprung. This teaching suggests that we can be divided up into variations of three basic body types, with a diet for each type. According to your propensity toward being either a Kapha, Pitta or Vata body type, or a particular mixture of these three, you are suggested to lean toward or away from particular types of foods, described variously as pungent, bitter, sweet, astringent, light, dry, hot, sour, salty, heavy, unctuous and cold.

The Food Combining Diet suggests that we should not mix our carbohydrates with our proteins, ignoring the fact that most foods actually contain combinations of both protein and carbohydrates, and that our digestive system is quite capable of dealing with both simultaneously.

Females need more iron and calcium, pregnant and breast-feeding women have increased nutritional requirements, while the elderly, the ill, and growing children all have their own specific requirements and everyone’s requirements are unique to them.

Media plays a significant role in influencing our eating patterns, with current affair programs readily picking up or dumping on fad diets and/or miracle foods, with an expert around every corner. Add to this scenario advertising campaigns from various companies and organisations, all with their own barrows to push, and we end up with a complex and confusing array of choices to make – just to put dinner on the table.

Hippocrates suggested we should let our foods be our medicines. Still very good advice! The trick is to take all of these theories into consideration and plan what is right for you. Our Naturopaths at Essential Health are educated in the body’s biochemistry and its nutritional requirements, with a balanced perspective on the numerous diets that you can encounter. They can give clear directions as you navigate through the dietary minefield.