A Healthy Life in a Healthy Home
Although I have been working real estate since 2002, I have always had one foot firmly planted in the natural food industry. When not developing healthy homes, I currently work as a Group Team Lead at a marvelous Northeast Illinois food and supplement retailer known as The Fruitful Yield. Founded over sixty years ago, it is still family owned and operated and staffed with people who are knowledgeable, courteous, and kind. This twelve-store operation is the anecdote for those fed up with our impersonal, home-delivered, shop-online Amazon world.
So as I come back to this blog a couple times a week, my plan is to stray occasionally from healthy home matters to also write about all those decisions that go into living a healthy life—like eating natural foods and taking supplements. After all, I can build a natural, non-toxic home all day long, but if the occupants of that home are not paying attention to what they eat and drink, or not exercising or controlling stress, or without a sense of purpose or supportive relationships in their lives, that healthy home can only go so far. Living a healthy lifestyle is part and parcel of living in one of my healthy, healing homes.
With that said, every healthy home begins with how your home was constructed and how you feed your family. In my own family, when our kids were little we told them all food fit into one of two categories—“strong” foods or “weak” foods. Strong foods are lower in saturated fats, lower in processed sugars, and when possible, organic. Weak foods are more processed, less natural, and have artificial colors and flavors and preservatives--chemicals which in my view, are detrimental to human health. The Greek physician Hippocrates once said, "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food" and we try and teach our kids this every time we fight off a cold with say Honey Loquat or pile on the garlic when feeling like our immune systems need a little boost.
As parents of kids who even when they were little liked to chow down on things like broccoli and brussel sprouts, I’ve always felt pretty good about what my kids were eating, even if we didn't always have the budget for organic. At least they were eating a bevy of strong fruits and vegetables.
That is until I came across a May 25, 2013 New York Times Opinion piece entitled "Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food", written by Jo Robinson. Even though this piece is nine years old, it is as topical today as it was when first published. In this article, Ms. Robinson talks very directly to the relative lack of nutrients in a typical modern American diet. "Wild dandelions", she writes, "...have seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, which we consider 'superfood'. A purple potato native to Peru has 28 times more cancer-fighting anthocyanins than common russet potatoes."
The upshot is that there are choices we can make to increase the nutritional profile of the foods we eat, but this article makes clear that those choices are becoming fewer and fewer and will continue to dwindle unless there is a change in government policy and until an educated consumer selects and demands better.
My most distressing take-away from this article is the systematic breeding of less nutritious species of foods by American farmers encouraged by U.S. Department of Agriculture policies that promote the development of more disease resistant fruits and vegetables with little regard for how nutritionally-deficient these new varieties might be. Ms. Robinson talks to USDA plant breeders who have spent a decade developing a new variety of pear or carrot without ever once measuring their nutritional value, and she concludes it is hard to increase the health benefits of our produce if we don't even know which nutrients they contain.
Which brings me back to my work at The Fruitful Yield. More on that in my next post.
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