Today is Sanctity of Life Sunday.  With all of the recent national debate about health care, it seems appropriate to focus on the health of the littlest among us…the pre-born.  Psalm 139 says that God sees their unformed substance as they are being fearfully and wonderfully made!  Science allows us now to follow this development via ultrasound.  As every mother is aware, it is now possible to see the child they love but have not yet held.

Yet that unborn child has an enemy.  A state protected enemy.  Even though a physician can now operate on an unborn child to correct something that will harm them, that same physician can also take away the life of that child and our government says that it is okay.  How can this be??  Why do we allow this?  We are all guilty because of our silence.

Whether a pre-born is wanted or not wanted, it matters not!  Their worth is equal to ours.  They may not be able to accomplish anything visible yet, but that matters not.  If I suddenly became incapacitated and could no longer accomplish anything, would I then have no value?  Of course not!  I am valuable to my Creator, apart from what I can accomplish.  I cannot give anything to my God but He values me now.  He valued me before I was born. He will value me after I die.

I begin by admitting how much I love salt.  At one point in my life, I was even salting pizza.  But the things you can get away with when you are young, you find out you CANNOT really get away with after all!

In this country, we definitely try to get away with eating lots of salt.  An average daily salt intake in the United States is 3400 mg.  There is a lot of debate as to how harmful excessive salt really is.  There is a possibility that the sodium/potassium ratio of your diet may be more important than your sodium intake.  Overall, however, there is a general consensus that Americans eat too much salt (or sodium, the main ingredient in table salt)  And there is also general consensus that there is a relationship between salt intake and high blood pressure.

Once you develop high blood pressure, limiting sodium intake is important.  But even before that, it makes sense that limiting sodium helps limit the amount of fluid in your body, and therefore the amount of work your heart has to do to pump that fluid and the amount of work your kidneys have to do to filter that fluid.

So limiting sodium intake is part of eating healthy.  Doing that in America, however, can have its challenges.  You could move to another country….but according to The Washington Post, people consume too much salt in 181 out of 187 countries.  If you do decide to move in order to restrict your salt intake, it appears you should head to Kenya, Cameroon, or Gabon.  And hey, its warm too!  I may consider this further………….

So what to do?  Again, the answer seems to be to cut out processed food.  If it is in a can or jar or box, and is processed in any way, it likely has too much sodium.  Deli meats are especially bad.  Hot dogs (are they really a food?) should really be a rare treat.  Restaurant meals also have a lot of hidden sodium.

One rule of healthy eating is to get enough fiber in your diet.  Doing this one thing can lower your chances of developing diabetes, as well as heart disease and stroke.  Adequate fiber also helps prevent constipation and hemorrhoids…..2 things that nobody wants!  While most Americans get an average of 12-15 gms daily, the recommended amount is 25 – 30 grams a day!  (Asians do much better and get about triple that amount daily)

All fiber is not the same.  In the last blog it was mentioned that eating natural and unprocessed food is healthy.  Well, some processed foods add fiber that is man made (from wood pulp or arthropod shells)  This is functional fiber….and it can make your stomach hurt.  Anyone who has had too many fiber one bars will attest to this.  It is best to keep to natural dietary fiber, of which there are 2 types.  Soluble and insoluble, both of which are healthy.

Soluble fiber dissolves in water and  consists of carbohydrates present in foods like barley, fruit, legumes, oats, etc.  You get the picture.  It is the soluble fiber that can lower one’s risk of stroke and heart disease by up to 50%.

Insoluble fiber is made up of plant cell walls and will not dissolve.  It can be found in grains such as wheat and rye.  Wheat bran is a good example of an insoluble fiber

You can determine how much fiber is in a serving of a food item from the nutritional label on the package.  If it is a whole food you can look up the fiber count.  For instance, a medium apple with skin has 4.4 grams and 1 cup of prunes has 12.4 grams.  A cup of peas has 8.8 grams but a cup of green beans has only 4.0 grams.  A cup of beans, however, may have from 11 to 14 grams!

So New Year’s Day was not a healthy eating day for me. But I want 2017 to be a healthy year for me and anyone reading my blog. I just completed some continuing medical education on Nutritional Myths. Fun stuff! I’ve decided to devote some of my blog time to documenting ways to live healthy.  That includes a healthy diet.

Basically, the healthiest way to eat is to eat unprocessed foods.  There are many reasons for this, so stay tuned.   For years I have told my patients that if God made it, it is likely okay to eat.  If man has mucked around with it, maybe not.  In the past the simplest way to eat was direct from the ground  In fact, the highly processed foods were not developed yet and therefore not around.  Unfortunately, in our fast paced culture the processed foods are now easier to get, so saying eat the simple way is no longer the best advice.  It takes work to have a garden. It takes a little more expense and time to buy from the fresh produce section.  Farmer’s markets are great and if you have access to one please support it.  We consumers should really start resisting what is not good for us.  If we don’t buy it, they won’t make it.

So the first rule of eating healthy is to get your food from farms.  If everything in your kitchen is from a factory, you have some work to do.

Engineering has its benefits, but when it comes to nutrition, it seems we cannot outdo our Creator, the master engineer, in developing food products to fuel our earthly tents!