I often heard the saying: "You are what you eat". In the past years, I kept thinking that it was just a saying and that people were acting in a freak way when it came to choose what to eat and how to eat. Yet my idea completely changed in the past few months. I now believe that most of the health diseases our society knows nowadays could be easily passed to history if people ate better. Now the big question is: HOW to eat better?
I have been reading tens of books on nutrition in the past years, but most importantly, I have experienced positive changes in my health by wisely choosing my food. What I found is this: humans have forgotten how to eat to be healthy. Wild animals don't have diabetes, cancer or asthma. The only two kinds of animals who do have those kinds of diseases are humans and their pets, or the animals whose diet is controlled and altered by humans. Our bodies didn't change that much in the past 30,000 years, while our diet has drastically changed in the past hundreds of years, too quickly for our bodies to adapt.
How exactly did humanity in general eat a few millenniums ago? We don't know exactly the proportions and amounts, the food combinations, etc, but there are a few things that we know for sure. For instance, people did not eat any transformed foods. No MSG, no transgenic foods, no white sugar, aspartame, white "enriched" flour, no pesticides, etc. And if they ate meat and dairy products, which are very hard to digest, they hunted it, so they very probably didn't eat as much as we do today, as sedentary people lazily going to the market. And they still ate a lot of plant products to compensate.
In fact, our digestive system doesn't seem to assimilate meat and animal products as easily as plant untransformed products. More and more studies confirm this simple fact. Vegetarians or even vegans with a well balanced diet live longer and have a better health than the average meat eaters.
The main reason being that animal proteins are very hard to digest. They acidify the organism and leave a lot of waste and toxins inside the body, bringing it to be less effective, accumulating fats and leaving less oxygen to our cells which then develop a lot of diseases like asthma, cancer, and artery problems. Another reason is that we often associate meat with unhealthy foods such as French fries, oils, pasta and starchy foods, which just don't go along well in our poor stomach.
And the probably most important reason is that we always cook meat, killing some precious enzymes which are only present in raw foods and are the key to a healthy body.
For all those reasons and many more, becoming vegetarian or vegan, and eating less transformed and more raw foods is probably the best move one can make to feel more energized and healthy.