Spring Cleaning 101: Nutrition

Spring is a time for rebirth, renewal, and rejoice! Longer days, more sunlight, and more opportunity to enjoy the outdoors and our lifestyle.

Let’s raise the bar on our healthcare and approach this Spring with a good cleaning of our diet house. The number one controllable thing we can do to prevent, and perhaps reverse chronic disease is nutrition. Plus, with good nutritional habits leading our lifestyle medicine, other areas of improving our health will be easier to incorporate such as exercise, meditation, and other stress reducing methods.

Imagine your body as a flower or a plant. For our garden to grow, we need to have bountiful nutrient rich soil, water, sunlight, time dedicated to the craft, and great nurturing care. If anyone of these areas is neglected, we can get weeds, stunt of growth, or even death.

So, let’s get started and pull out the weeds together in our daily diet for our beautiful growth.

Weed Number One: Simple Sugar. Take simple sugar, syrups, and juices out of the daily diet. This message is nothing new. But the difference this time is to focus on fueling that growing garden and sugar is the weed. Simply checking labels on common shopping cart Items can be quite alarming. While taking desserts out of our diet can be obvious, you may not realize added sugar in foods such as supermarket rotisserie chicken that is coated with brown sugar and or molasses. Same with popular jarred spices. We just had to pull the weeds out of our spice rack looking through our rubs with sugar as the number one or two ingredients. Sugar is addictive, a main reason why it is so prevalent. Sugar provides little nutritional value, spikes our insulin levels and gives us much less energy than we think with an unwanted quick crash.

Weed Number Two. Processed Deli Foods. Well, no surprise here, sugar and caramel coloring tend to be the number one or two ingredients in deli processed roast beef, some turkey, and salamis. Plus, they contain preservatives such as nitrates where studies have shown them to increase your risk of cancer, type II diabetes and stroke.  We can still enjoy the convenience of making quick sandwiches or salads with perhaps left over homemade roasted chicken spiced with garlic, lemon, and oregano. Also, you may find a local deli that will provide fresh sliced turkey or other meats but realize your shelf life is limited. This is also an opportunity to include plant-based proteins into your lunches such as hummus, bean salads, almond butter, and banana sandwiches.

Weed Number Three. Alcohol. In many cases this goes hand in hand with eliminating simple sugars as many cocktails are made with both. Alcohol alone provides 7 calories per gram, all of them empty calories and the inclusion of syrups will make a popular drink over 300 calories. But it’s not just the empty calories that is of concern, impairment of our judgement and avoidance of our fears and worries can lead to other troubling behavior. Pulling this weed out, we can focus on the things we want to do, improve our communication with others, improve our self-confidence and our overall well-being.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary. how will your garden grow this Spring season? Blessings for an abundance of energy, peace, smiles and growth.

(Originally published in the March 2023 Cohen Children’s Medical Center Restoration Newsletter)