A Word From Down Under

This journey to wellness is fascinating and filled with stops along the road I'd never considered before.  What are micronutrients? is the question of the last three days--and I now can answer that question, sort of.

I watched Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead on Netflix last night. In this documentary, an Australian man recovers from fatness and sickness by going on a six-week cleanse with fresh juices and vegetables.  I may never do anything as extreme as that, but I am going to go to the juice bar later this morning and buy a mixed fruit and vegetable juice.

Tom cured himself of an autoimmune disease by drinking only fresh juices for six weeks; then he introduced the same plan to others, including an obese American truck driver he met with the same disease.  The transformation was dramatic in both of them.  The truck driver wound up losing almost 300 pounds.

Then I researched juicers for a couple of hours: masticating juicers, centrifugal juicers.  For now, I'm not ready to purchase a large juicer for the kitchen, what with three good juice bars within a few miles of here, but I may later decide to do that as well.  We'll see.

The take-away from last night's research, especially the video, is that fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds and beans, are the carriers of micronutrients--essential for healing and avoiding disease.  Most of us, according to the film, rely on macronutrients, found in everything else besides fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and beans. Think bread and potatoes and spareribs and fish.

To get all the micronutrients your body needs, he claims, you would need to eat more food than you could eat in one day: platters of beets and celery and apples and kale, for example.  If you mix up a few of them every day, add some apple, say, to sweeten the mix, you give your body a chance to reboot from years of eating food products heavy in calories but light (or missing in) nutritional value.