A better way to eat.

Nutritional deficiencies can cause chronic illness over time. They are implicated as major lifestyle risk factors for the leading causes of death in Australia such as heart disease, cancer, and dementia. (1)  Despite our love for supplements, multivitamin supplementation has been shown ineffective at reducing this risk. (2)

Getting your recommended daily intake of micronutrients is essential to a strong immune system! Micronutrients like Zinc, Selenium, and Vitamin D and C are “cofactors” which means that they “help” other reactions to occur, including in the growth of immune cells and immune responses. (3)

Nutrition is very complex. Health information is often overwhelming and untrustworthy. To sort through the information and turn it into practical daily steps requires a kind of obsession; mine as a nutritionist! But when faced with turning this complexity into action the balance can easily tip into paralysis. We usually try to do too much at once. In the extreme case we develop obsessions with food – enabled by unhealthy food environments and metabolic and physiological responses to diet change – that cause us to chronically overeat or develop harmful psychological responses. Food and nutrition are not the end goal, they are a means to a long, satisfied, comfortable life.

Good nutrition is fundamental to mental clarity and productivity. Numerous studies have shown the positive effects of good nutrition on cognition and emotion in children and adults. (4, 5, 6) Omega-3 supplementation was even found to significantly reduce aggressive behaviour in prisoners. (6) For the average person, a poor diet can impair productivity through having low energy and losing focus when nutrient deficiencies exist, or through the chronic inflammation that tends to be present with overweight and obesity and that affects the brain. (7, 8, 9, 10 )

Food is a precious joy of life and culture. It can be hard to maintain balance when highly palatable and heavily marketed food affronts us daily. To continue to deeply enjoy it and the social interactions it facilitates, we need to set boundaries and have strategies that make us resilient to routine disruption. 

Everyone has their own path. It’s in our nature to be resistant to direct advice which we didn’t seek out ourselves. Particularly when we feel that it comes from an ideological or emotional place. It can be frustrating to share our new beliefs and have them fall on deaf ears, but it’s a good thing that our friends and family exercise skepticism – there’s a lot of bad information out there! It takes time. Your actions and results over time sow the seeds for change in others. Your persistent, quiet actions do eventually effect those that love you. When they see you succeed, eventually they will quietly seek to incorporate parts of your path into their own.