Healing foods: For common ailments - Softcover

Dr Penny Stanway

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1856750175 ISBN 13: 9781856750172

Publisher: Gaia Books, 1995

Synopsis

Book by Stanway, Dr Penny

About this title

About the Author:

Dr. Penny Stanway

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

Sages and physicians in ancient times were well aware of the strong links between food and health, but the coming of modern drug- and technology-based medicine has meant that centuries of such nutritional wisdom have evaporated almost overnight. There has been an explosion of commercial food processing, and at the same time our home and work lives have become increasingly divorced. We are no longer much involved with our food. We are opting out of preparing food in flavor of using convenience foods, which are cleaned, refined, cut up, mixed, preserved, flavored, and cooked in factories by people who have no physical or emotional connection with us. Few people grow their own fruit and vegetables, and even fewer tend their own livestock.

We are witnessing an unprecedented change in eating habits in affluent westernized countries, and developing countries are following suit. The average person eats a diet extraordinarily high in saturated fats, refined sugar and cereal, meat and other animal products, and commercially processed food, and surprisingly low in fresh -- and raw -- fruit and vegetables. No longer do we save our valuable sweet and fatty foods, and laboriously sifted flour, for feasts and festivals. Today, feasting happens every day and it has unexpectedly brought us a great deal of ill health. While more than half the world starves, the rest of us gorge. It is a paradox that nutritional deficiencies are common in the overfed. They eat too much rich, sweet, but often nutrient-poor food, and often not enough nutrient-rich staples. Nutritional deprivation through the overconsumption of high-priced, feast-time foods means that our diet is thoroughly unbalanced. As a result our health suffers.

Healthy people constantly react and adapt to the various stresses in their lives. One way of aiding these homeostatic mechanisms is by eating a healthy diet geared to age and activity, and to the special requirements of pregnancy or breastfeeding, as well as to the weather, season, time of day, and personal taste. Another is to alter the diet according to personal health and inclination, and learn to use food as a medicine when helpful. It's important to listen to the messages from the mind and body, and to become more sensitive to their needs. Continually ignored messages lead to vague symptoms of ill health. Eventually overt lllness results.

Taking responsibility

Perhaps before long we will relearn what the ancients knew -- that our food call be a source of goodness and energy far beyond its caloric and biochemical content. We can alter the vibrant, dynamic, free-flowing energy that keeps us well by the food we eat. The energy the East knows as prana or Chi -- the life force -- is present in food more or less, depending on its quality and freshness. Good food is a vital source of wellbeing. When our vitality is blocked by a poor diet we feel unwell, lethargic, and at d low ebb. Our energy seeps out of us and we lose our zest for life. Our food is intimately linked with our vitality and with our feelings toward ourselves, others, our planet, and the source of our spiritual strength. Yet we have grown to think of it purely as a physical fuel and have lost any sense of respect for it.

Changing our diet offers us a whole new way of being. We call use our food to look after, love, restore, and heal ourselves and others. Good food offers us the chance of better physical, emotional, social, and spiritual health. Our health is far too important to be left to scientists and other "experts". We can start taking more responsibility for our wellbeing now, and our choice of the food we eat is one of the most important ways in which to do this.

About this edition

• Publisher: Gaia Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1856750175
• ISBN 13: 9781856750172
• Binding: Paperback