Smart about your whole foods

Smart "old wives tales"
The regular advice your grandma ever gave you (apart from "don't touch that") may have been the best: eat more fruit and vegetables. Is that a smart idea? Here's the 2009 update: eat more whole foods. Whole foods can be easily defined as anything - fruits, vegetables, meats, grains that are brought to you untreated and in their organic state, in there purest form. They are, simply, food, not food-derived products that host a lot of vitamin enriched or calcium fortified and govern the modern food stores of today. More than anything else, being smart with whole foods diet won't just help you live more healthily, but it can also help protect the environment.

Whole foods provide nutrients in their most natural unprocessed state, when they are best able to absorb into the body and start making a difference straight away. Omega-3 enriched orange juice, for example, may sound good, but you're better off getting your vitamin C from a real orange and your Omega-3 fatty acids from a natural source, such as oily fish such as mackerel or herrings or nuts, these whole foods are smart foods, they contain balanced combinations of other vital vitamins and minerals that are much better for your body.

What gases do you let off?
It's been shown that eating whole foods can also cut major carbon emissions. The most recent EPA assess connect over 24 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the food industry, a large part of which comes from food processing and packaging. By being a little smarter and keeping to whole foods, you can stop these emissions altogether. A smart diet of whole foods can be extremely easy to follow, and you don't have to shop at "Whole Foods R Us". Simply avoid processed and packaged foods as much as you can steer clear of refined grains and sugars.

For the most part, this means looking for whole grain bread and pasta products, avoiding low-fat and falsely enriched foods that have been modified from their original forms, and staying out of fast food joints. By not accepting these additives and modifications, we all will have a better, healthier smarter existence whilst reducing your environmental impact.