Table of Contents
We dedicate this book to our patients
at The Specific Chiropractic Center,
who have been the guiding force
and inspiration for this book and
who have taught us so much.
INTRODUCTION
As chiropractors, our job is to help our patients navigate the sometimes treacherous, or at the very least confusing, path to health and wellness. During our years of working with patients, we realized several things, two of which stand out. First, it is absolutely amazing how many people are suffering from chronic pain, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic, degenerative diseases. Second, most people have very little idea about how much their daily decisions affect their overall health.
One area that individuals do have control over is what goes into their bodies. Unfortunately, so many people are constantly on the go, consuming lots of junk in the form of processed foods and fast foods. This is an age when processed foods are found in great abundance and antioxidant-rich foods have fallen by the wayside. Despite the number of farmers markets and the amount of fresh produce available, many people just dont know how to choose and cook organic, antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables. Often they cant name the most common or healthiest foods available at their local stores and dont know what antioxidants are or how they can transform the body.
We realized that often people want to make healthy decisions but simply need some guidance in making that happen. So we began to put together lists of what we call super foods (page 42) along with recipes and nutritional guidelines to help our patients transition to healthy eating, not only to aid in the healing process but to ensure continued health and vitality. As we reach out beyond the walls of our practice, our intention remains the same: to keep healthy eating simple by providing clearly defined nutritional information for the average person to use every day.
We hope you will use this book as a guide to healthy eating and living. Our goal is to give you a grasp of the ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) scale and a practical understanding of antioxidants and the many benefits of whole foods. A majority of the essential nutrients that everyone needs on a daily basis are found in the foodsspecifically fruits, vegetables, and herbslisted in this book. We have formatted it to be a handy reference that will make it easier for you to choose whole, antioxidant-rich foods when youre at the supermarket and farmers market. These foods provide a framework for preventing and fighting chronic diseases.
Well delve into the ORAC scale in detail later in the book. Right now, its important to know that the ORAC unit, or ORAC value, is a method of measuring the antioxidant capacity of various foods. The scale is primarily used to ascertain which foods have the highest antioxidant values. By referring to this book, youll be able to quickly identify the healthiest foodsthe ones that fight the damaging, disease-causing molecules called free radicalsand learn how to put that antioxidant power to practical use.
CHAPTER 1
What Should I Eat?
One of the most common questions that our patients ask us is, What should I eat? Thats not surprising given all of the conflicting information about nutrition and diet. One day you hear about how harmful fats are to overall health and how they lead to heart disease and chronic illness, only to learn the very next day that low-fat food products are bad because of added preservatives and refined sugars. Nutrition has become a very confusing landscape riddled with contradictions about what is healthy and what is not. Its no wonder everyone is so confused.
Conflicting nutritional advice comes from a variety of sourcesdoctors and other health practitioners, the media, diet books, government initiatives, and industrialized corporate food companiesall throwing around words like low-fat, omega-3s, antioxidants, high fiber, and gluten free, in order to sell products or explain nutrition. What does all of this mean, and how do you separate what is truly healthy to eat from complicated nutritional health claims that may be untrue and unhealthy?
Over the years much research has been done on the topic of healthy foods and nutritionally healthy diets. We, as a society, learned that we did not necessarily know what it means to eat healthy. What we thought was healthy turned out to be saturated with processed, unhealthy junk, and what we thought was unhealthy may turn out to be integral to body function. With all of this clashing information, we, as practitioners, began to understand why our patients were frustrated about gaining weight and becoming unhealthy while following what seemed to be good nutritional advice. We also found that our patients, and people generally, were looking for a magic bullet to avoid obesity, heart disease, and other conditions such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, and chronic fatigue.
While there is no magic bullet, we discovered many useful things about nutrition, diet, and health that wed like to share. We learned that it wasnt about eating less of one nutrient and more of another. It wasnt about splitting up nutrients to try and get the most out of just one. It is actually far simpler than that. We learned that the easiest way to be healthy is to eat real food. Doesnt get much simpler, does it? We hope that once people understand what is causing them to become overweight and sick, they will be ready to make the necessary changes and move toward whole, natural foods.
Our society is dominated by the Western food diet, or Western food pattern, which consists of lots of processed foods, meats, fats, and sugar. And whether intentionally or not, it also includes preservatives, additives, hormones, and genetically modified ingredients that the human body is unable to metabolize properly, if at all. Researchers now know that people who follow this diet commonly end up with chronic diseases: obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Of the top-10 health-related killers in Western populations, 5 are chronic diseases directly related to diet. This way of eating is causing significant problems in the health of many industrialized nations, killing millions each year.
Its no wonder so many of us are concerned about what to eat. Everyone knows someone who has died of a heart attack or cancer. Many people try to blame genetics, but that argument just isnt believable anymore. At this point, industrialized nations need to stop trying to tweak and change processed foods to be healthier and instead focus on doing away with them altogether. All of us need to begin making changes today, in our individual lives. It has become clear that the Western diet is not paving a road to health; it is forging a path to illness.
Industrial food processing has taken our traditional diet of thousands of edible foods to one consisting of a few main ingredients: processed corn, rice, soy, and processed wheat. While these foods are not intrinsically evil, they have become harmful as a result of the immense processing they go through to become food. These four ingredients have become mainstays of the diet in America and other industrialized countries. Soy and corn make up more than one-third to as much as two-thirds of our daily diet. Our diet has become a glut of corn- and soybased products. If you were to go into your pantry right now and pick up a box of cereal, you would likely find corn or soy listed at least two or three times in the ingredients. They have become our main sources of nutrition for a number of reasons, starting with the advent of fast foods. Corn and soy can be produced, manufactured, and delivered inexpensively; they are cheap and readily available for busy families; and they can be nutritionally fortified with vitamins and minerals, which were stripped in the manufacturing process. While this sounds reasonable, the reality is that our limited, monocultural food source is killing us every day, without most people even knowing it.
