Rosenthal - Integrative nutrition: feed your hunger for health and happiness

L ife is a delicate balance between doing good and avoiding harm. The earliest single-cell organisms explored their environment looking for food, evading poisons and trying to avoid becoming food themselves. As life expanded into a multi-cellular animal kingdom, a kind of inner knowing developed. Animals have a sense of what to eat or avoid and instinctively know how to eat when sick, when breeding or in different seasons of the year. Our earliest human ancestors also had this inner knowing, as they ate local roots and greens and benefited from successful hunts and seasonal harvests.

Life has certainly become more complex. Our ability to process and transport foods has expanded beyond anything previously experienced in human culture. We fill supermarkets the size of football fields with more than 45,000 items, many of which are processed, packaged items wrapped in bright shiny packages and filled with sugar, fat and additives. Amidst all of this abundance, our compass of inner knowing has gone awry. Its become blocked by the magnetic attraction of foods that are engineered to tempt our taste buds but to neglect our health. We no longer instinctively know what to eat.

Adding to our confusion is an overwhelming glut of information about nutrition. A stampede of new diets on the market each claim to be the best and each have developed their own small following: High protein, low carbohydrate versus complex carbohydrate, low protein versus all raw foods versus vegan versus only grapefruit and on and on it goes. What each of these approaches misses is that were all different. Our biological individuality allows one person to thrive on a diet that is a terrible for someone else. Following a diet plan designed by someone whose genetic makeup and nutritional needs are different from our own cannot restore our inner knowing. For real answers, we must look deeper.

In actuality, all of life is nutrition. Understanding this truth requires that we adopt a new perspective on foodone that integrates nutritional science, biological individuality and relearning our inner knowing. In this book, my friend and colleague, Joshua Rosenthal, presents an integrative holistic framework that will help readers see nutrition in an extraordinary light. His approach to nutrition offers a clear path to healthy living. Ive watched his school, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, grow from a small group to class sizes reaching more than 1,000 students. The word is out, because people are literally getting sick and tired of eating food that doesnt truly nourish them. With a simple, unique theory, Joshuas program addresses the full framework of nutrition. It focuses on truth rather than dogma, on real experiences rather than concepts and on a nutritional spectrum beyond food groups.

I know firsthand that a holistic, integrative approach like Joshuas really works. For decades Ive seen how people who have lost touch with knowing what was good for them can recover health and balance. As a young physician in the 1970s, I began to practice a more natural method of patient care that included nutrition, vitamins, herbs, stress reduction, lifestyle changes and exercise. It became clear to me that people needed more education about how to be well. Like, Joshua, I created a school. When I started Omega Institute over 30 years ago, it was simply an adventurous experiment to create a space where people could learn and directly experience how to live in greater balance with themselves, others and our environment. I had no idea then that the holistic industry would become so large and in demand. People who come to Omega even for just a few days awe me with their capacity for transformation. I witness dramatic changes in their lives from eating whole foods, taking in lectures from inspiring teachers and experiencing nature.

Our society desperately needs more people who can help others to deeply nourish their health and inner beauty. Joshua and his students are part of a growing revolution to awaken and change society for the positive by recognizing the interdependence of all life. They represent a great opportunity for healing on many levels of our society and our planet.

This book encapsulates this different approach and new path. It offers you simple tools to help take control of your life by changing the way you view your health. Each of us can unlearn destructive habits and start living to our fullest potential. As we learn to tune into our inner knowing, we begin to listen to our bodies and fill them with whole, natural foods that nourish us.

We live in an era of time poverty, where were caught in a constant state of hurry sickness. We consume massive amounts of caffeine to speed us up, eat fast foods to save time, work while eating to stay productive, but we never catch up. It is possible to shift these behaviors. Start by slowing down here and now: enjoy this book. Savor it like a good meal. Then start your meal with a few moments of silent breathing, chew slowly and enjoy the taste. Health and happiness begin with slowing down to enjoy every moment of your life.