How Can We Beating Disease With Eating? (Healthy Tips)

Healthy Tips

Often, we can’t control our environment and the air that we breathe, but we can control the effects of toxicity within our body by getting proper and adequate nutrition for our cellular health as well as to combat the toxicity within our body. It all begins with what we eat.

Meals that Heal (Healthy Tips)

Our intake of food is usually made up of macronutrients and micronutrients.

Macronutrients: Macronutrients are energy providers such as proteins, fats and carbohydrates from fresh foods and rice, noodles, meat, grains and dairy products.

Micronuttrients: Micronutrients are vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that help the cells and tissues to function well. These primarily come from fresh fruits and vegetables.

Unfortunately, most people in the modern society tend to take too many caloric macronutrients (without the micronutrients) especially in Asia where the main staple is often rice, noodles and meat. The consumption of canned, instant or processed foods and fast food also dominates most developed and developing nations, with carbohydrate sources, meat and seafood as the key features at the dinner table.

It has been acknowledged by health authorities worldwide that most diets are lacking natural fruits and vegetable that provide most of the micronutrients that we need on daily basis, especially antioxidants. The importance of eating sufficient fruits and vegetables daily has also been recognized by the National Cancer Institute which recommends an average of 7 servings daily to ward off the threat of cancer. This is because antioxidants can neutralize free radicals within the body, thus stopping the chain reaction that causes untold damage within our body.

Phytonutrients Powerful Antioxidants (Healthy Tips)

There are many different types of antioxidants, but some of the most powerful come from phytonutrients , which are now gaining the attention of researchers worldwide due to their enormous contribution to health. Phytonutrients or ‘plant nutrients’ are the nutrients that give a plant its colour, smell and taste.There are many different classes of phytonutrients, and to date more than 16,000 phytonutrients have been identified.

Consuming different types of phytonutrients in our food sourceis is important as different phytonutrients have different oxidative reactions in different cells but most importantly, most phytonutrients are powerful free radical scavengers. Some types of well-known phytonutrients are:

Beta-carotene gives carrots their bright orange colour and protects us from the development of cancers and heart diseases. There are many other carotenoids.

Flavonoids give pigments to berries and contain antioxidant, antibiotic, cancer-preventive, anti-inflammatory and other tissue-supportive properties.

Sulfur compounds from broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower have anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, immuno-suppertive and antibiotic properties.

How much is 7 servings? (Healthy Tips)

7 servings of fruits and vegetable may sound daunting, but it’s not impossible. A medium sized apple, banana, or orange, ½ cup cooked vegetables, 1 cup of salad greens-each of these are equivalent to 1 serving.

Although 7 servings of various fruits and vegetables are recommended daily for health maintenance, the intake of many still fail alarmingly short:

In USA, less than 9% of adults consume the recommended servings; the average American eats < 3 serving.

In Malaysia, averagely 88.3% people consume < 5 servings, and around 12.3% do not consume any.

In Singapore, 20% of its population eat 2 servings of fruits and 15.8% take 2 servings of vegetables daily.

(source: World Health Organization)

Healthy Tips