Sola Ogundipe
1 July 2008
One of the highlights at the opening session of the 1st Vanguard Allure Women on Wellness (WOW) seminar which opened in Lagos on Friday, June 20, 2008, was the presentation by Nesta-certified nutrition expert, Princess Kathy Emiko. The paper presentation entitled "Strategies for Reaching and Maintaining a Healthy Weight" was an incisive excursion into the nitty gritty of healthy eating.
"Never diet," she warned. "Diets can never turn you into a paragon of health. Endeavour to stay off noisy foods that disrupt the calm of a healthy diet."
Kathy's delivery was not just professional, it was brilliant. "You can't go wrong with eating right," she pointed out while explaining strategies for the best and most effective ways to reach and maintain a healthy weight. "You need healthy eating habits. It's not just OK to eat WELL, you need to eat RIGHT," she admonished the spellbound audience.
-One of the benefits of pineapple and coconut is that both help build healthy bones. Pineapples are rich in manganese, a trace mineral that is needed for the body to build bone and connective tissues. Bromelain, which is found in pineapples, has been found to help suppress coughs and loosen mucus.
For several reasons, Kathy's lecture struck a vital chord in the psyche of everyone who listened to her that day. Her message was clear. Most Nigerians are inadvertently killing themselves by eating the wrong food. Living on fast (junk) food, is instalmental death. Women (and) men need to change from their reactive approach to their health and adopt a proactive mindset. The point is that simple things like "preventative maintenance" and investing in preventive health would make a substantial difference in our health.
As the Greek physician and father of medicine Hippocrates said, "Let food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food." We would all be well-advised to keep this ancient piece of wisdom in mind when choosing our vitamin and mineral supplements.
As human beings, we are designed to eat whole food. The problem is that the majority of supplements on the market today are unsuccessfully attempting to duplicate the nutritional value of whole food nutrients with synthetic isolates. Most multivitamins and nutritional supplements are synthetic, chemically isolated nutrients that lack the natural beneficial compounds of a whole-food complex.
Thankfully, there is a growing understanding of the importance of whole-food form nutrition and along with it, a revolutionary approach to creating superior nutritional supplements.
The key to health remains a balanced body. Unhealthy dietary habits of indulging in highly acidic foods such as sugar, white bread, noodles, white rice, red meats, dairy products, chips, pop, coffee and alcohol, rather than alkaline foods such as vegetables, legumes and fruits ought to be the norm.
By avoiding primarily acidic food, toxins that will create health hazards in later years are avoided. But we need to first understand a few simple nutritional facts to be able to correctly change our dietary habits. It needs to begin at home from the traditional basics. We need to appreciate better that poor diet leads to disease.
In total agreement with Kathy and the likes of her, making some simple lifestyle changes, including better food choices - more vegetables, legumes, fruit and much less sugar - and taking some preventive natural health products, would relieve the growing pressure on the healthcare sector substantially.
We can appreciate that in today's world of refined and processed foods, obtaining proper nutrition is a considerable challenge. The relationship between proper nourishment and optimal health needs to be better drawn out. Indeed, is our society not overfed and undernourished?
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Vanguard. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
