A whole food diet is plant-based, focused on eating unrefined and unprocessed foods. You enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, tubers and legumes, and cut back on or eliminate any type of processed food. This typically means reducing the amount of meat and eggs you consume, as well as anything with refined sugar, bleached flour and other processed food ingredients.
Why Eat Food with Minimal Human Intervention?
Why would someone eat nothing but natural, unprocessed and unrefined foods? More and more people are turning to a whole foods diet because of the long list of health benefits this nutritional approach has to offer. You don’t have to be a nutritionist or health expert to understand that an apple is better for you than a double cheeseburger.
This is because the more tinkering and modifying that is done with your food before it reaches your plate, the less healthy it is for you. The following is a shortlist of just a few of the major benefits a whole foods diet provides.
- Reduces your risk of becoming overweight or obese
- Helps moderate healthy blood pressure
- Regulates a healthy cholesterol level
- Reduces your risk of contracting diabetes
- Lowers your odds of developing heart disease
- Makes your skin and hair stronger and healthier looking
- Lowers your chances of developing neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s
- Increases mental functioning and clarity
- Boosts your natural energy level
- Improves your sleep patterns
- Cranks up your natural immune system, dramatically increasing your ability to resist and even cure disease
- Boosts your sex drive
When you eat unprocessed foods, as close to their original, natural state as possible, you get more of the nutrients, minerals and vitamins your body needs. Foods that are highly processed (generally those products sold in a bag, wrapper, container or can) have many of their nutrients removed in the manufacturing process. Then unhealthy, addictive ingredients like refined sugar, salt, MSG and trans fats are introduced.
This makes food last longer on your grocery store’s shelves. It also drastically limits the natural components your body needs to be healthy. Even worse, since your brain recognizes after a 1,500-calorie fast food meal that you are still lacking in nutrients, it tells you to eat something else. The addictive chemicals that have been added to your food answer that call by making you crave the very food that caused this unhealthy problem in the first place.
So your reach for more fast, processed foods, your body never gets what it needs to be healthy, and you develop a laundry list of physical and mental health complications.
This is how a whole foods approach to nutrition delivers so many incredible benefits. You replace unhealthy, nutrient-poor processed foods with natural, nutrient-dense foods. These foods contain high levels of dietary fiber, vitamins, minerals and enzymes, and are wonderfully low in calories and carbohydrates compared to fast food and processed foods.
So your body begins to heal itself, your natural energy levels are boosted, your immunity system kicks into high gear to keep you healthy, and from your head to your toes you are able to enjoy mental and physical health benefits. Begin eating more organic/grass-fed meats and plant-based whole foods today, and cut back or eliminate processed foods. In as little as 24 to 72 hours, you will begin to experience the wonderful benefits a whole foods diet has to offer.
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