Vitamins are Helpful, but ...

Growing Our Bodies with Good Health Nutrition

When we were growing up our parents were highly concerned with our health nutrition; many of us were told to eat our vegetables so that we could become big and strong. Of course, we did not eat our vegetables yet we still managed to grow up, for the most part strong, and perhaps too big. The truth is that while our bodies can subsist on relatively unhealthy foods, eating with an eye towards health nutrition, including consumption of fruits and vegetables, is an important part of growing up healthy and living a longer more active life.

Our bodies have an amazing ability to find the health nutrition we need where they can and to let us grow up despite our poor eating habits. While complex carbohydrates and protein are nutritionally the best way to get energy, the amazing machine inside each of us can make use of simple sugars, high fructose corn syrup and all the other empty calories that find their way into our bodies. Nonetheless, eating healthy, providing your body with sufficient nutrition is an important part to staying healthy from childhood throughout adult life, and healthy habits developed over a lifetime will help us all to live longer and more productive lives.

Choosing the Best Foods

Our bodies are also designed to pull nutrients from natural foods that we eat. The more natural the state of the food, the better use our body can make of these nutrients. When food is highly processed the nutrients are partially (if not completely)`12q` broken down, rendering them much less useful to our bodies.

For example, fresh green peas and broccoli are surprisingly high in vitamin C. But when frozen, broccoli loses about 20 percent of its vitamin C and green peas lose around 30 percent. Vitamins E and C are important in that they help to eliminate free oxygen radicals from the body; excessive radicals speed the age with which our body cells age.

Cutting to the Chase

The point of the health nutrition story is that the more natural a food is the better use our bodies can make of it. Raw fruits and veggies are better than blanched ones, and blanched are better than boiled. Solid health nutrition includes a diet of fiber, found by eating fruits and vegetables, not simply drinking their juice. Dark colored vegetables and a diet that includes a wide variety of vegetable colors, also aids health nutrition – think of color as nature’s way of saying that something is healthy or of ensuring that you eat a good variety. Choose a variety of colors, dark and bright, eat sufficient quantities and try to eat some raw and you will improve your health nutrition and your longevity.