Louise Hay: Loving Yourself to Great Health
Heather Dane: Food has had a special place in every culture in the world. The Dalai Lama said: “Everyone needs food. Food is life. We come from food… and food is what connects us all.”
It’s important to understand the science of food and its relationship to the body and brain. To explain this in the simplest terms, real, whole food from nature nourishes the good bacteria in your gut. These good bacteria not only act as a health team to keep you strong and hardy, they also communicate with your brain, signaling you to feel calm or anxious, for example. In other words, what we eat plays a key role in moods, sleep and overall health.
Unfortunately, modern food manufacturing has taken us so far away from real food that we have disconnected from the deep relationship between food and our body-mind. Today’s processed foods disrupt the bacteria, killing the good guys and cultivating the bad guys, setting up a recipe for health challenges. How did we get here? At one time, our ancestors ate food from the land. Today’s food, however, has been changing since the Industrial Revolution in the 1800’s. During this time a food shortage began because people were moving into cities in droves and they could no longer grow their own food. I like to call this the time of “food shenanigans.” During this time, food adulteration began as a way to deal with shortage. Brick powder was added to cocoa, ash was added to tea, and sweepings from a store floor were added to foods to stretch them. While there were outcries about these practices, the bigger food shortage crisis took precedence. One of the most egregious forms of adulteration described in Reay Tannahill’s book, Food in History, was an Italian company that was convicted in 1969 — not that long ago –for making parmesan cheese out of plastic umbrella handles! And you think, well everybody’s still fine right? Even with all this going on? But they’re not. Because even though the food has changed into manufactured, processed food, the human body is still the same – designed for real, whole food.
