Make Life Easy

Though we are far more than what we eat, our bodies run best on the highest-grade fuel possible. When you pull up to a gas pump, there are three choices: regular, medium grade, and premium. All cars run best on premium. It burns better and leaves less residue.

- Christiane Northrup

It’s the same with your body. What you eat contains the building blocks that become your tissues and organs. When I was doing my surgical training and in the operating room regularly, I was astounded by the variations in the quality of people’s skin and tissue. Some had resilient, strong connective tissue. In others—even as young as 18—the tissue was so weak and of such poor quality that you could actually separate it with your fingers while making an abdominal incision or moving different organs out of the way. The healthy tissue required a scissors or knife to separate it. One of my professors called the weak stuff “taco tissue,” meaning that it resulted mostly from a fast-food diet high in simple carbohydrates without enough fresh produce and protein.

Making life easy

When skilled body workers touch people to stretch their fascia or massage their muscles, the first thing they feel is the quality of the individual’s tissue. And the quality of that tissue is vastly improved by eating an organic, whole-food diet. Quality whole food—grown in soil with a high nutrient content—is vital not only for maintaining optimal health, but also for recovering from illness. I like to say that eating whole, organically grown food is like breast-feeding from Mother Earth herself. Just as there is no substitute for breast milk as the optimal food for babies, there is no substitute for food that is directly grown on the land or in the sea.

There is no shortage of books out there telling you what you should eat. The problem is that they often contain conflicting messages. For a couple of decades, the virtues of low-fat, vegan eating were extolled. Then came the raw-food enthusiasts who say we should never subject our food to heat lest the enzymes be ruined.