Food - the problem and the solution

Bad food choices directly causes health problems - much of our community’s regular diet.

Good food choices directly improves health and fights diseases - growing awareness.

Food choices are both the problem and the solution.

As we research product and lifestyle factors that affect health, a few smack you in the face.

Diversity often comes out on top.

Diversity of food ingredients is essential to optimum health. The reason processed foods can be extremely unhealthy relates to many factors that I summarise as ‘calories without nutrition’. We have all learned that dietary fibre is critical but it has become clear that complex dietary fibre foods are much more beneficial to the microbes in our gut than plain pre-biotics. They need to eat too. The best microbe foods (pre-biotics) contain both soluble and insoluble fibre – the double ‘whammy’.

Work at the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University found that a healthy gut microbiota, nourished by fibre, helps clear away pathogenic (harmful) bacteria from the intestinal tract. Consumption of a highly-processed low-fibre diet can result in pathogens persisting at low levels and promoting metabolic diseases - particularly diabetes.

Processed foods, a staple of Western diets, could be making you sick | Salon.com

Most of us know what to do, but I find regular reminders of what is best for us helps.

The message – Eat Complex foods – low processed complex foods are best.

Keep Healthy