Whole and unspotted.

One of the essential aspects of natural living, in my opinion, is maintaining things in a whole and untainted state. This applies of course to the beautiful natural terrain and wildlife we find in the world, but also to the things we put in our body, namely food.

As a society, we have moved more and more away from using things in their whole state. Food has become more refined, more processed, and as a result, less nutritious. Think of 100% juice that has a message on the side telling consumers that there may be color variations from one bottle to another. Grocery stores don't label their apples or pears telling you there may be color variations from one fruit to another, yet we have become so accustomed to juices made from overly refined, artificially colored fruit (or worse, fruit "flavoring") that we are not used to the natural variations in color in juice made without all these "extras". We eat white bread, skinned potatoes, apple juice, without once considering that these things were all once whole, and that we are only consuming one tiny part of that whole.

Food was, by and large, meant to be kept in its whole state. More and more we are realizing this as a society, but we must make a push to include it in our way of life. Consider a potato. In an effort to make the potato "better", we skin it, cook it, cut it up, run it through a food processor and make it into fries. Yet in doing so, we strip the potato of its vital nutrients. The potato was meant to be kept whole. All the most important vitamins and minerals are contained in the skin of the potato, and we benefit from eating it as a whole entity and not refining it into an unrecognizable strip of fried starch.

I encourage everyone moving towards a more natural life to include more whole foods in their diet. Fruit is more beneficial to the body than fruit juice because fewer of the vitamins have degraded and it still has its beneficial fiber. Contrary to popular commercials, we should be encouraging everyone to find ways to include whole vegetables in their diet, rather than encouraging them to drink a juice substitute. Nature was meant to be whole, the way we are, the way we were meant to be.

Tip of the day: Get whole grain into your diet by grinding your own wheat to make whole wheat bread. If you don't have the time to grind and bake (who does these days?) then make sure to look carefully for real 100% whole wheat bread. Good bread will have a short ingredient list with no high fructose corn syrup. Watch out for breads that are labelled "wheat" but really made of white flour and colored with molasses. The first ingredient on the list should be 100% whole wheat flour, and ideally there should be no white flour at all. The fewer ingredients, the better!