The Designer Colors of Nutrition

This is one of my favorite subjects, especially this time of year when locally grown produce starts becoming available! We have shaped a food industry that largely caters to fast and packaged food markets, due to the demand we as consumers have placed on these food-like products and it’s showing up in not only the obesity epidemic but also the ensuing onslaught of chronic disease in this country!

Seeing the emphasis on real food (single ingredient items) in the new food pyramid recommendations at realfood.gov is really refreshing! All the different colors a variety of fruits and vegetables provide are different nutrients and they serve different purposes in the body.

Examples: Green color: helps our vision. Orange color: helps vision, healthy skin, and our immune system. Red color: helps improve heart health and lowers risk of cancer. Purple color: reduces cancer risk, anti-aging, and supports mental clarity. White color: (as in onions) helps reduce cholesterol levels, lowers blood pressure, and helps prevent diabetes.

Getting a variety of colors throughout a 7–10-day period is important to ensure that these nutrients stay at protective levels in our blood. This is what helps build our immunity to potentially harmful things whether by contact or consumption. What really turns these vegetables and fruits into designer packets of nutrition is if it is locally grown and consumed. I strongly believe the things that grow in an area help people deal with environmental conditions of that area and that they are a part of our body’s checks and balances and the more we eat from outside sources the more imbalanced our inner health will become, (sort of like thinking the same set of tires that works on a car in the south will work on a car that faces icy conditions in the north).

In other words nature has a reason that the Noni berry grows well in the South Pacific, the orange grows really well in Florida and the peach grows really well in Georgia, they are nature’s packets of multi vitamin and minerals designed by that area for that area. Another example is how honeybees use local pollen for production of honey produced in and area and this same honey will sort of vaccinate you against allergy problems because it’s made from the pollen in this same area. We don’t need a lot of space to grow a small garden and probably most of us have an area of our yard that could be a lot more productive then growing grass!

We can also support and purchase more of our fruits and vegetables from the roadside stands and farmers markets in our area, these are the ones that bridge the gap between farmer and consumer in our local areas! If we can start as an individual, family, community, and county, to change what we perceive as good food and change what we consume, we can change the status of health and fitness in our region! By becoming a community that lives and breathes health and fitness, we can empower the internal systems God blessed us with and decrease our need for medicine and medical interventions.

By supporting our local Farmacies known as our produce stands, we can access our best sources for localized multivitamins, immunization, and medications that help condition us against what we face locally!