Healthy Diets: How Whole Food Nutrition Helps Prevent Disease, Part 1

Understanding how whole food nutrition helps prevent disease is the purpose of this article. It is much easier to prevent almost any health problem than it ever is to attempt to treat it or cure it after it is already present. And it has become quite apparent that a critical part of helping your body do what it already knows how to do to stay healthy is by supplying it with plenty of whole food nutrition.

Now, all that term means - whole food nutrition - is all of the nutrients that are present in the foods that we get from plants – fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, berries, beans, etc. We all know from childhood that fruits and vegetables are good for us – the problem is that there aren't very many people who realize just how very dangerous it is NOT to eat these foods. We all probably have the feeling, “Yes, I need to eat fruits and vegetables and I might be a little better off if I eat some, but I’m ok right now” – that’s probably not true if you’re not eating these foods.

It really is dangerous to not eat these – now why is this? This is because it is now understood that there is a process in the human body, that is a normal part of our metabolism, that determines one’s rate of aging and risk of disease and if that process is allowed to go along at a faster rate, then you age more rapidly and your risk of disease is much higher and your body has much more trouble healing problems that do occur – this process is called oxidative stress. All it means is that when oxygen is burned by the cells to produce energy, little by-products called free radicals are left over; these free radicals damage the cells and the contents of the cells and any substance in the body with which it comes in contact, essentially.

And that damage determines rate of aging and risk of disease and how much trouble your body is having staying healthy.

There are certain things we do in life that can increase risk – smoking is number one, emotional stress certainly does it because that speeds up metabolism. Physical stress does, too – including exercise because, if you think about it, when you exercise you burn more oxygen because your muscles need more to produce more energy and that actually produces more free radicals and without the proper protective nutrition, exercise can also speed up this damaging process.

There are essentially two major parts to this whole food nutrition. First of all these foods contain literally thousands of substances called phytochemicals or phytonutrients, just meaning they are occurring in plants, and they are also called micronutrients because they are there in such tiny amounts – micrograms for the most part – and a major part of this concept is that none of these micronutrients are substances that we need large amounts of in a day’s time.

Rather, the body knows how to use these with a little bit of everything present because there is a tremendous interdependence among these nutrients; there’s a synergistic effect to having them all together, so it’s really important to take them in in that way and with it being literally tens of thousands of substances, there really is no other way to get it other than as it occurs in the food.

Now the two major sections or divisions among these are: Number one is many of them participate in the normal metabolic processes of the cells – the biochemical reactions that make up the light and the activity of a cell and, therefore, of an organ and of the body. The other major part is a group called the antioxidants – this is a group of at least several hundred, if not several thousands, that all function together because they function in a sequence, at least groups of them do – they’ll function in a sequence where one works and only then can the next one work and so on down the line.

The role of the antioxidants is to neutralize those harmful free radicals before they can cause the damage that increases your rate of aging and risk of disease. So it’s vital to have these nutrients and antioxidants all together. This is one of the major dangerous effects or results of not having whole food nutrition. We’re allowing that damaging process to go along at a much higher rate.

Unfortunately, there really isn’t an alarm system in the body – not an obvious one - that tells you on Monday that you didn’t eat enough vegetables on Saturday. It is several years, at least, of this damaging process going along at a higher rate before the symptoms of a degenerative or chronic disease start to show up, like cancer, emphysema, heart disease, arthritis, kidney disease – all of our degenerative diseases are at least worsened by, if not caused by, this process of oxidative stress, so including enough whole food nutrition in the diet is an imperative aspect of staying well or preventing disease.