In this nutrition course I have learned that in order to be healthy, you need to eat whole foods. By whole foods, I mean the foods that were eaten and prepared before industialized food came along, such as raw milk, grass fed beef, non genetically modified corn, bone broths and many others. The industrialized food system has created the illusion that nutrients added into the food make the food healthy when in fact, it doesn't. Nutrients taken in isolation don't help even near as much as the nutrients that are naturallly in the foods. Therefore, in order to get the nutrients that you need, you need to eat whole foods.
Your body needs to be strong. One of the essential things you need to be healthy is proteins. Proteins are a macro-nutrient made up of amino acids, and are used in your body to build the tissues in your muscle, to hold the calcium that makes up your bone together, to holds our nerves together, and many other things that are essential for us to live. If you don't get enough protein in your diet, consequences are: loss of vigor, impaired growth in infants and children, and a diminished immune response. You can get protein in your diet by eating foods such as dairy products, beef, ham, and other meats daily. To calculate the least amount of protein you need every day, eat about 1.6 grams of protein per 2.2 pounds of body weight.
Of course, you must be wary of what you eat. MSG is a ingredient used in many industrialized foods that makes the food taste. But at a price. MSG has excitotoxins that make it so that there is an addiction of sorts to the food that the MSG is in. Also, it does damage to your brain, making foods that have MSG in them unhealthy for you. MSG also has many hiding spots on the ingredients list such as glutamate, aspartame, autolyzed yeast and caseinate. But there are many other hiding spots for MSG, making it difficult to pin a product that has MSG. So in conclusion, it is best to avoid processed foods as much as you can.
In short, I have learned from my nutrition course that I should: Eat whole foods as often as you can instead of the processed foods you might find at a store, don't believe ads about nutrients added in to the product to make it healthier, stay away from MSG and all its aliases found in the ingredient lists, eat grass fed meat and raw milk, and make sure you get enough protein in your diet.
