Healthy eating tips from Robyn Chuter

Choose whole and minimally processed foods over refined, fractionated foods.
Whole brown rice is nutritionally superior to pasta or crackers made from brown rice flour. Whole carrots and apples are more nourishing than their juice. Traditional soy foods such as tofu and tempeh are far more health promoting than soy cheese or fake meat made from isolated soy protein.

Whenever we process a food, we change the nutritional composition of the food, and the way it behaves in our bodies.

Whole-wheat berries take a long time to digest, keeping you satisfied for longer. In fact they take so long to digest that a considerable amount of the carbohydrate they contain is not absorbed through your gut wall, and instead ends up in your colon, feeding your friendly gut bacteria which in turn produce a myriad of beneficial substances from them – including short chain fatty acids which suppress your appetite.

But those same berries ground into flour and baked as bread – even wholemeal bread – break down much faster. This results in more of their starch calories being absorbed, but leaving you feeling hungry again sooner than if you were to eat the unrefined carbohydrate.

Almonds, walnuts and other nuts are wonderful foods that protect against heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes and obesity. The oils extracted from them have none of these beneficial effects. In fact it damages our endothelial cells – the cells lining our blood vessels, which regulate blood pressure, keep our blood flowing freely instead of clotting, and prevent the formation of artery-clogging atherosclerotic plaque.

Eat food, not components of food reassembled into food-like substances!

This article is sourced from Hopewood contributor Robyn Chuter.