I’m just back home after several cross-country flights to visit my granddaughter in California and my tummy’s been talking to me. It seems out of sorts and so am I. Of course sticking to a healthy eating program in airports and on planes is never easy, even if you’re fairly sure of what it should look like. I carry snack packets of almonds, walnuts, and pumpkin seeds and a sandwich bag full of greens to munch on. But during this trip they didn’t quite work their magic.
Something I don’t pay attention to when I’m home and feeling well is the reality that ninety percent of my cells are non-human microbial cells. These are the cells that help digest the food I eat. Many a world traveler has experienced the revenge of taking on unfriendly bacteria or losing the good bugs they had relied on for good digestion and bowel health. Searching the Internet to see what I could do to help myself I learned there are 40 trillion of these bacteria in each person’s body. In other words, we contain multiples. And current thinking on this score suggests our diet better be diverse and fibrous and fermented enough to keep the friendly critters we carry friendly.
I’ve lived through the up and downs of scientific recommendations on what foods are considered healthy. Margarine or butter? Egg whites only or include the yolks? Popular food fads and diets have included the Low Fat diet, the Mediterranean Diet, the Dean Arnish Diet, Weightwatchers, the Eat for your Blood-Type Diet, and Paleo, to name the ones I remember.
In teaching my granddaughter Kyra about healthy eating her parents have done a good job of introducing her to diverse choices of fruits and vegetables, which are the mainstay of most any healthy eating program. She got the nickname from me of “the little dipper” when I saw how enthusiastically she scarfed down raw vegetables after dipping them in yogurt or ranch dressing. As food is the best medicine it’s great we’ve been able to replace at least some of the candy and other sugary treats so common in the kid environment with what most people would agree is real food.
The next focus for our family around what we ingest is the quality of the water we drink. We’ve been conducting our own scientific experiments measuring and comparing the particulates and contaminants in tap water, refrigerator filtered water, water we run through a filtered pitcher we purchased, and bottled water in southern California and southwestern Pennsylvania. There is definitely a difference in the purity and the taste of the various waters, and I guess we’ll need to keep listening to what water the 40 trillion microbial cells that we carry in us prefer.
How do you navigate all the messages and ever-changing recommendations of what constitutes healthy food and safe clean water?
Sheila
