This is the list of “super foods” I’ve researched. I have simplified them using images below. When I am at the grocery store shopping and I’m not sure what to get, this list helps me to buy foods that will be as healthy as possible.
I am new in town to Montreal, Canada. Because I am not sure how long I am going to be here, I did not move my kitchen from LA. Basically I have nothing to cook with. It was challenging for me in the beginning. I was continuously hungry and my tummy was not tolerant with outside food. However, I still want to eat well and enjoy the food that the locals in Montreal have to offer. I did some research and my new eating method seems to be working. It is very simple, efficient and free from animal product!
These are my notes what I believe that the best foods to eat are to enhance our immune system against cancer. Writing in English is still a challenge for me and even worse with biology words so please bear it with me. It is only going to be better.
The adult human body is made up of about 60-90 trillion cells and over 200 different kind of cells. In means, if you lined up all the cells in a human body end-to-end, you could actually circle the earth 4.5 times. So keeping your health well also means that you are protecting your healthy cells. The question is how we can keep our cells safe. One of most important part thing of the cell is the cell surface. Because the antenna on the cell surface is a key to healthy development and disease prevention.
Next one is Mitochondria. Mitochondria are the energy factories of the cells. The cell will have a lot of structures that are capable of producing a high amount of available energy.
Therefore, “the best food” means that has a lot of materials which will protect our cells. We also need to know what will destroys our cells.
Free Radicals are the most harmful thing our body ever produced. It destroys our cell surface, Mitochondrial and does damage to our DNA. It plays a role in inflammatory disease and progression to cancer. The amount of Free Radicals our body produces is depend on our life style. Our body produce more if you do over eating, over working and are stressed etc. It is important how much Free Radicals are been produced and it is also important the direction it takes.
Normally, the body can handle free radicals, but if antioxidants are unavailable, or if the free-radical production becomes excessive, damage can occur.
Therefore the good food which protect our cells from free radicals. Which we call phenolic compounds. Natural phenolic compounds play an important role in cancer prevention and treatment. What it does is it accepts the free radical into them and it changes to something which doesn’t harm to our body. Therefore one of the most important ways to keep our health is to have the phenolic compounds. So the best food for us should have a lot of the natural phenolic compounds.
“Phenols are one of the major groups of nonessential dietary components appearing in vegetable foods. They are a wide chemical compounds group that are considered as secondary plant metabolites, with different activity and chemical structure, including more than 8,000 different compounds. Phenols, has traditionally been considered as antinutritive compounds due to the adverse effect of one of their main components, tannins, on protein digestibility. However, actually there is an increased interest in these compounds because they have been associated with the inhibition of atherosclerosis and cancer. The bioactivity of phenolics may be related to their antioxidant behaviour, which is attributed to their ability to chelate metals, inhibit lipoxygenase and scavenge free radicals. This review make a global view on the main phenolic compound groups, their organoleptic effects in vegetable foods, their physiological effects in humans, their metabolism, bioavailability as well as their content in the diet.”
2. Vitamin E – in Rice Germ, bean etc
One important thing: Even though they are the most important food for our diet, but if you eat too much of them, it wont work. ( Yes, it is very difficult to control the amount of food we eat. It is very important to know what effect is has on us by doing this. )
This is my personal story of how looking at the food I eat has helped me to improve my health.
I am a computer animation artist working on movies and living in Los Angeles. I’ve been working pretty much non stop for the last 11 years in 3 different countries. Like most people, I’ve spent most of my time at work and on other “high” priority things in life. And unfortunately, I wasn’t able to give much attention to my health.
I generally didn’t have any serious problems with my health and I always felt that I was relevantly healthier than most. Therefore questioning what I eat everyday didn’t get my attention. Since I’ve left home, I’ve eaten whenever and whatever is available. Like most of people in modern society, we squeeze our meal times in during our working hours. I developed my own way of my cooking. Whatever I eat should not take more than 15 min to prepare. It has to be quick to cook and also delicious. Because of this, most of the time, I just ate some kind of convenient food or pre-made food.
3 months ago, I finally had time to take a break from work. On my first day from not working in June 2013, my body wanted to get up at 7 AM as usual and get ready to go to work. My brain had to tell my body: “No work to go to today!”. How funny that the body remembers it’s daily routine.
My high blood pressure pill
The first thing I do in the morning is take my high blood pressure pill. Obviously I had too much time to kill. That morning, I was staring at the bottle for a while. It says Lisinopril 7.5 mg daily. I know I’ve been taking this pill ( I don’t even remember when I started to take it) for at least 5 years. So I should be cured by now, right? Yet I’m still taking it. Why? I remember I used to take 5mg but my doc told me that I needed to increase to 7.5mg to control my blood pressure. Why hasn’t the medicine cured the problem? Why am I taking this pill which doesn’t even help me get better? And am I getting even worse than when I started? Why haven’t I questioned this before? All kinds of questions came up in me. So I started to research what ‘High blood pressure” ACTUALLY is.
I am not a doctor so there is a limit to what I can talk about. But one thing I am sure about is that High blood pressure is not a diseases. It is a symptom. Our body is telling us something is wrong. In a home with good clean plumbing pipes the water pressure is normal and the water flows smoothly. But when the pipes get clogged and therefore narrowed, the water pressure becomes much greater.
High Blood Pressure is like this. Our body needs a certain amount of blood. Even if our blood vessels have become narrowed and blocked it will still require the same amount of blood and will push the blood through with more force. This can create a potentially dangerous amount of pressure on our system that could result in a heart attack or stroke. Basically that is what High blood pressure is. Perhaps we know this but we don’t seem to know why the pipes got clogged and narrowed in the first place.
The medicine they give us keeps the blood flowing through our pipes at a lowered pressure to prevent a heart attack or stroke. Which is great. But doesn’t this mean that less blood is being supplied to our organs? How are they to get all blood they require?
I was thinking when I was little, I did not have any of these problems. Obviously I ate well, food was always on time, not precessed, we rarely had meat and I was much less stressed for sure. I was always running, jumping and playing with friends. Fresh/real food and exercise regularly and non stop laughing.
I’ve been taking the pill for 5 years and yet I’m still taking it because I haven’t done anything about the actual problem. Therefore I’ll have to take the pill forever and will likely have to increase the dosage from time to time because the problem will only get worse. This is why I wanted to try fixing the root of the problem and started looking into my diet as a way to fix this.
My veggie juice diet
That is how I started to my new diet: I changed my diet to 90% vegetables, including drinking veggie juice and 10% fish (once every one or two weeks). After 1 month I reduced my pill from 7.5mg to 5 mg a day. During this time I checked my high blood pressure at least 3 times per day. I could clearly see it getting lower and lower slowly. Then I reduced the pill to 2.5 mg while still monitoring my blood pressure often. Currently I am not taking the pill at all anymore. My blood pressure is now pretty much normal.
Sometimes if i eat some cookies or any processed food I can see it go up for sure. But mostly it stays between 110 to 120 and lower pressure is around 70 to 80 ish.
My juice diet is especially great. I am getting more nutrition than ever and it is a perfect way for me to carry on especially when I get busy again. I found drinking fresh veggie / fruit juice is the best way for me to keep my healthy life style. I make veggie juice for 2 days and drink it 2-3 times per day. If I am too busy for food, at least I can drink veggie juice to give me some nutrition. After this, I noticed that I feel less desire for fried or precessed food. Surprising my veggie food is giving me a noticeable glow that even other people have noticed.
Atherosclerosis is the usual cause of heart attacks, strokes, and peripheral vascular disease, what together are called “cardiovascular disease.” Cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer in America, with more than 800,000 deaths in 2005.
If this is really caused from what we eat then why don’t we eat right? Some people would rather eat what they want and risk having a shorter life than eating properly to ensure a longer life. After I started on my veggie diet and especially after my 3 day fast, the food I used to eat didn’t taste the same anymore. My tongue doesn’t seem to like them anymore. It definitely changed.
Fresh local veggies taste so good and fruits are so sweet and delicious now. I feel like I’ve never tasted them before. The more and more veggies I eat the taste seems to get better and better. So I am not sure that the food we think we are dying for is actually real or not. It seems to me that the cleaner your body gets you can taste the real taste of food much better.
My 3 month journey with food was amazing. In the beginning, because I only ate veggies, I felt weak for a while. After the juice fast, my energy seemed consistence and stronger for sure.
My 3 day fast
This is the note I wrote on Facebook during my 3 day fast:
Now a-days it is very easy to get any food you want and we often eat food which we should really be careful of. I’ve never thought about the consequences of what food I ate. Why do we have to have the right nutrition? How does our body react with them? Apparently our body is a big hospital full of amazing doctors. As long as you put the right ingredients into yourself it will self repair. What you eat explains everything.
I believe that the cleaner my body is, the wiser and closer to happiness I become.
I am still fighting with temptations of eating a lot more than I should and can’t resist some sweets now and then. But I would never go back to the point in my life where I required a pill. I now realize my body, mind and happiness are all working together. I believe that the cleaner my body is, the wiser and closer to happiness I become.
Here is a video I made recently explaining how to use my Breville 800JEXL. I made carrot juice during this demonstration. Enjoy!
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