Vital Force Naturals

Everywhere you look health experts are telling us to eat more green vegetables. So why do they keep banging on about it?

Most vegetables are green. It’s to do with photosynthesis (remember your school biology) The plant takes the sun’s rays, carbon dioxide and water and through photosynthesis produces oxygen and energy in the form of carbohydrate, which it then stores to help it to grow and reproduce. We then harvest the plant and benefit from the energy of the sun. Well, that’s the really simple version. Everything uses the sun’s energy to produce its own energy (cows eat grass that has used the sun to grow etc) so we indirectly consume that energy whenever we eat fresh, unprocessed food. Once the food has been messed around with – filtered, refined, hydrogenated, pasteurised, cooked, packaged, processed in other words, we lose many of the nutrients and energy contained in that food, depending on what it is and how it’s processed. Ideally we want to be eating foods as close to nature as possible.

But why so much green?

All plants contain chlorophyll, the greener the plant the more it contains, it’s how they photosynthesise. Chlorophyll has an almost identical chemical makeup as human blood, except blood has heam at the centre of its molecule and chlorophyll has magnesium. Chlorophyll has been called the ‘blood of plant life’ and has many properties – anti-inflammatory, cleansing, purifying, and alkalising, and is full of other nutrients too. So you could say that any green food is a super food! Magnesium is especially important to us as it helps regulate blood pressure, relax muscles, transmit nerve signals, produce energy and helps synthesise enzymes and proteins, amongst many other things. But because of our modern diet and lifestyle unfortunately many of us are lacking in this important mineral. We also have to recognise that many of the foods we eat today, even natural organic foods, are lacking in mineral content because of over farming and the soil is depleted of nutrients. Over the last 50 years the mineral content of vegetables has declined drastically. All the more reason to up your green intake!

Your body wants to be alkaline. The gastric juices in your stomach contain hydrochloric acid to break down foodstuffs and protect you from pathogens you might eat, but the rest of your body is much happier when it’s in a more alkaline state, everything works better. However, with the food that we’ve been eating progressively for the last 40 years or so and the way we live we are becoming more acidic and toxic than we really want to be. That means our bodies have to work a lot harder to keep up, no wonder most of us are tired, achy, and fed up. All that energy, it’s exhausting! So it’s really important to feed your body what it wants and needs, natural, green foods to help it do its job. Many of the mild symptoms you suffer from, headaches, sinusitis, lack of concentration, rashes, spots, dandruff, general aches and pains, indigestion etc are signs that your body is struggling to cleanse. If these go unchecked over time they could become chronic, or worse become other illnesses that are much more serious and harder to treat. So it makes sense to help it now, right? But how do you do that?

If you’re really keen you could keep a food diary over a couple of weeks just to see what you actually do eat (the reality is always rather different from the imagined!) This is great if you are really suffering from something and would like to do something about it. But most of us aren’t that disciplined. So start by eating something green at every meal. Take a look at your plate. How beige is it? Swap cereal and toast at breakfast for poached eggs and avocado with a side of spinach. Sandwich for lunch? Add some salad leaves, cucumber and peppers. Whatever your evening meal is, always have a side of broccoli, beans, asparagus, cabbage, salad or all of the above. Whatever floats your boat, add it in, your body will thank you for it. After a while it becomes the norm and you start planning meals with the veg, not just adding them. Once you’ve mastered the green stuff experiment, go for the rainbow. Different coloured veg contain different phytonutrients, but that’s for another day.

So, if you suffer from headaches or your shoulders are aching or your sciatica is playing up you can really help yourself by upping your green veg intake, i.e. upping your magnesium intake, helping to relax muscles and improve nerve impulse transmission. And if you’re really struggling contact me for details of group and individual on line self help sessions in self massage, acupressure and nutritional healing

vitalforcemail@gmail.com

07973 548858

@vitalforcenaturals