Food for Thought

 Many times our relationships with food are based on what 'someone' has told us. Do not eat salt, do not eat sweets, nor drink alcohol. Drink plenty of water, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, eat five small meals per day. Follow the relationship rules for food and you won't be too fat or too thin, and there is no such thing as being too healthy.





What if everything you had heard about having a good relationship with food got turned on it's head? What if there wasn't a rule book for eating that applied to everyone? What if something that is good for you isn't good for me and vice-versa? A relationship with food should be a personal one, shouldn't it?


SALT
Let's take salt for matter of example. We have all been told that consuming too much salt was dangerous, that at very least it caused high blood pressure, and that it was one of the villains in heart disease. A month or so ago this idea, rule if you would, got turned on its head for me when I took my daughter to the cardiologist. My daughter had been suffering for years with sudden fainting attacks that looked very much like sudden seizures. I found out that she had a condition that was described as an immature automatic response system and that when she was in a heightened state (fear, or excitement) her body shut down and she would faint. This is caused often by not ingesting enough salt. Salt was the connection her body needed to act correctly. This while I was busy cutting salt from her diet, my family's diet as a whole, and my diet. I was all about spices and had cut salt out as a spice, failing to realize it was not only the spice of life, but the spice for life.

Beer...

Either we have a good relationship with beer or we don't. We like it or we don't. Likely very few of us sit around pondering its powers for healing and it's health benefits. In fact, it is more likely that we think it is what has been making us fat, giving us that so attractive beer belly. Steven Harrod Buhner the author of Paradise Lost: Of Healing, the Sacred, and the Beer, talks about have for tens of thousands of years beer was used medicinally and sacred rituals and how far we have come from that past knowledge. "In many ways the true value and wondrous mystery of herbal fermentations, of brewing itself, has yet to be recognized in our modern Western world. But the mystery is still there, waiting to awaken our wonder, if we only let go and drink a little deeper."(Buhner, 2005) 

http://www.gaianstudies.org/articles3.htm