I was recently having dinner with some friends talking about our children and one of them mentioned how despite her best efforts her children were constantly getting sick.
Every day for school she packs them an elaborate lunch box with fresh fruit and vegetables, she reminisced about her own childhood and how she was never sick as a child even though her parents never really paid much attention to what she was eating.
This got me thinking as to how we can help boost ours and our children's immune system, because unfortunately with modern farming practices we are never going to get the nutritional value out of foods that our Grandparents and ancestors got.
Today's Food
Most of our foods are sprayed with numerous chemicals, are grown in soil that has been over farmed and is depleted of minerals, and furthermore are often picked well before they are ripe so they can be transported to where they are going to be sold and then sprayed with ethane gas to ripen them.
All of these practices are leading to a society that is getting sicker and sicker, even if we are doing our best to eat an organic diet, these chemicals will leach into our water and have a knock on effect to our health and the health of our children.
So unless you are growing all your own fruits and veggies organically you are probably ingesting chemicals that your body wasn't designed to eat. If you are eating organically that will at least reduce toxic load, however as I already mentioned much of our soil is depleted so often our produce isn't as nutrient dense as the soil of times past.
So what can we do about this?
Of course trying to eat an organic diet an minimise exposure to chemicals can greatly help, however consuming foods that are particularly dense in nutrition and foods that help to detox can assist us in maintaining robust and healthy bodies.
This is where Superfoods can play a role!!!
"SuperFoods" can be an ambiguous term however it is basically referring to foods that are nutrient dense, they are foods that are high in antioxidants, they are plentiful in vitamins and minerals and can have powerful healing abilities.
Many Superfoods are high on the ORAC scale which is a scale that measures the number of antioxidants in foods, the higher the levels of antioxidants the better a food is for you as antioxidants help to fight disease and inflammation in your body. Antioxidants help protect the body from damage caused by free radicals which cause ageing and health deterioration.Foods that are high in antioxidants such as:
- raw cacao powder
- goji berries
- Maca powder
- Chlorella
- Spirulina
- Kale
- Beetroot
- Cloves
- Cinnamon
- Camu Camu
- and Tumeric, are believed to help supports our immune system and can help to combat illnesses.
