On my recent trip back to Australia for a week I noticed a few things that seem completely out of whack compared to my current life in Asia.
The constant negative fear mongering news was one thing, but the other even more scary thing was the modern western diet, even those who think they are eating healthily - it's enough to make a healthy person sick....
The number of take out meals consumed was quite large, and compared to the local stir fry's cooked up fresh on the streeet corner, the western take out is invariably unhealthy. Heavy on bad fats, preservatives, artificial colours and flavourings, low nutritional value and high calorie. Pizza, fast foods, ice creams, snack foods high in sugar and fat, high sugar soda pops and colas, preserved fruit juices, the list goes on.
Shopping for fresh food is little better. The 'fresh food' is often of low nutritional value, filled with preservatives, a variety of chemicals, grown in hydroponic clay or soil that has been overgrown in for years, and hormones. In the profit driven west fresh food is driven by weight at sale, the heavier the produce the higher the profit. This leads to the female hormone estrogen being added to foods before market, and like a woman having her period the 'fresh foods' also gain additional weight through water retention from these hormones, this effect occurs in plants and animals.
On top of that the fruit and vege is bred purely for size. How many times have you bought some great big apples or bananas and bitten into them only to find that they have little taste? You have not noticed? That's because the changes took place slowly and now you are used to them. Try getting some real fresh organic fruit and tasting the difference. Now besides taste do you think these will be lacking nutrients too?
The steaks in Australia from the 'fresh produce' section of the supermarket are soaked in an artificial red dye to make them look more appealing - yet this same dye burns quickly under heat leaving you with a thin layer of scorched black chemicals, a great source of carcinogens and free radicals - really healthy.
Don't even get me started on chickens and eggs. One look at the ingredients of the stuff they are fed, the growth abnormalities, the feeding process and the hormones added to these poor creatures and the growth defects resultant from this tells you that eating these sickly deformed things cannot be healthy for you. The fact they have to add yellow dyes to get the yolk to have a colour these days also says a lot, as does the crappy taste in comparision to real birds running and eating freely.
'Fresh' is a debatable term too, 'fresh' produce in the West can refer to foods that are chilled but not frozen, so they are chilled to a few degrees above freezing and kept for extended periods this way. By the time you get them all the living organisms that are responsible for a great deal of the health benefits of fresh produce have gone.
Compare that with what I eat here, in Asia....
Outdoor Asian Butcher Shop
This is my local butcher on his motorbike driving off and leaving hte meat sitting on the counter while he does deliveries - OMG! says the Westerner, how unhygenic, how unsafe, food poisoning!!! Ahhh, panic attack.
Settle.
This 'shop' only sells pork, the butcher goes ot the markets early every morning a chooses a freshly slaughtered pig, fresh as in just killed and bled then served to him. This is then sold to the local restaurants (and me) and is then cooked that day, any left overs going to the homeless and the street dogs. With really fresh food there is no chance of food poisoning.
The fruit for sale at the local green grocer comes from the same markets as the meat in the case of the area that I live. Every morning hundreds of pickup trucks, with NO refridgeration, make their way into Bangkok with just picked fruits and vegetables for sale at the markets. Again how fresh could you get without living on a farm and doing it yourself.
The chickens are actually chosen live in many instances at the market and killed on the spot, as are the ducks and geese. The eggs are collected that morning.
Add to that the huge numbers of various herbs and plant material (we'd call them weeds in the West) that the Thais cook with that have positive, demonstrated health benefits and you start to get the picture.
While in Australia I visited a health food store with a friend and had a look around at all the 'health foods' and guess what? I did not see one natural living edible plant for sale. There were pills and potions and powders of various sources but nothing fresh, nothing with the living goodness still available inside. I saw slick marketing and questionable produce, does it really work? Who knows.
My friend bought some vitamin C and a complex B group vitamin, now I am not saying that these are a waste of time, but what do you think the bio-availability of these would be compared to eating natural fresh picked fruit? Not to mention the plethora of other micro substances that are available in these foods.
Think about it. Your body assimilates the foods we eat, if you eat healthy living foods (living at a micro-biological level) with all the enzymes, flavinoids, bacteria cultures, and all the other good things then your body gets these good things too. Eat a dead powder and your body can extract a few basic nutrient blocks - vitamins, minerals and carbohydrates, protein or fats only.
Just my thoughts on this subject, but eating a frozen pizza with a low fat cheese topping and emblazoned with the marketing phrases 'low sugar' or 'low fat' or with the Australian healthy heart tick on it does not necessarily mean you are eating healthy foods.
Eat really fresh, really healthy foods and you will find it impossible to be obese and very difficult to be fat, and even then the fat distribution will be even over the body giving you the impression of being bigger, and not with a fat arse and sagging gut and cellulite thighs.
It all comes down to diet.
Unfortunately many in the West try to be healthy but due to the contamination of the food supply, the greed of the the large (multi-national) food producers and the profit driven marketers there is a lot of misinformation out there and eating a western style 'healthy' diet can in fact be very bad for you, no wonder your diets don't work.
