The Whole Food Blog

Obtaining the best pregnancy nutrition today requires pregnant women to learn more about including plenty of whole foods in their diet.  Whether expecting or not, the need for a balanced diet that includes vitamins and minerals from whole foods is common sense.  This is even more significant when pregnancy nutrition is involved as a healthy diet that includes plenty of whole foods is a perfect way to help the baby develop to its full potential.

Since weight gain is always a consideration for pregnancy nutrition, it’s a good idea to know in advance how many additional calories are needed.  According to the Institute of Medicine, “Active pregnant women need about 2,500 to 2,700 calories per day during the second trimester and 2,650 to 2,850 calories per day in the third trimester. Inactive women will require fewer calories.” One way to avoid any lack of proper pregnancy nutrition is to eat the best whole foods while avoiding empty calories.  Fresh fruits and vegetables are relatively low in calories for the amount of nutrition they provide.

In addition, excellent pregnancy nutrition can be obtained from all natural whole food concentrates and supplements.  Research shows that supplements made from whole food ingredients are absorbed by the body more efficiently than those formulated with isolated vitamins and minerals.  Raw, whole foods and all natural whole food concentrates prepared at low temperatures are more likely to contain live enzymes, which can allow for more effective absorption of the nutrients into the cells.

By choosing the right whole foods as part of any pregnancy nutrition plan, both the mother and baby will have the best prospects for a healthy birth.

While there is much confusion about pH balance, it is important to understand how alkaline foods and acid foods affect overall health. There are several different ways to measure pH levels, but here we are talking about what happens to foods after they have passed through the digestive system.  Once the nutrients have been turned into energy you are left with either an alkaline ash or acid ash in the bloodstream, depending on whether you consumed alkaline foods or acid foods.

Your body is so efficient that it will not allow the pH balance of your blood to deviate far from 7.4.  This is considered the optimal pH and your body will do whatever is necessary to maintain that balance.  Unfortunately, this means that your body often has to seek out the best possible sources of alkalinity to counteract excess acid in the blood, and that source is usually calcium from your bones.  So, you can begin to see how your body benefits from more alkaline foods to draw upon in order to manage a healthy pH balance.

This is why experts recommend a daily diet consisting of 80% alkaline foods and only 20% acid foods. When there is a lack of alkalinity in the diet to help manage that delicate blood pH balance, then the body has to pull calcium from bones in order to neutralize excess acid in the bloodstream.  This may cause bone weakness as well as other possible challenges to fitness.

It’s not easy to consume an 80/20 ratio of alkaline foods to acid foods every day, but it is possible to at least take steps in that direction.  As you research this topic more, you will find that the benefits of a healthy pH balance are numerous and the dangers of an imbalance are even more so.  To gain a better understanding of how your daily diet affects your alkaline/acid balance, take the Alkaline Food Test for your own personal results.

It’s not always easy to determine what’s really healthy, but online health food stores are now offering greater details on products like health drinks.  As an owner of one such store, we often go to great lengths assuring customers that things like preservatives, isolated vitamins, artificial dyes or sweeteners are not included in our all natural foods and health drinks.

In addition, at our online health food store we have investigated the manufacturing facilities for the products we carry to be certain that they are processed at low temperatures.  This is the extra care that certain manufacturers take to maintain the complete food structures and live enzymes inherent in the whole food ingredients they use.  Unfortunately, some of the so-called health drinks and all natural foods at typical stores are devoid of nutrients because of the high temperatures involved in the packaging processes.  This is one of the major benefits of shopping with an online health food store.  You can know greater details about how your foods and drinks are prepared for you.

Today, some people avoid alternative methods of shopping for health foods and drinks because they fear a loss of modern day conveniences.  Of course, you know that if you can Google, you will easily find an “online health food store with all natural health drinks”.  Then, you will most likely uncover more detailed information on what you are buying than you could ever get from a typical retail store.

It’s as easy as a mouse click to understand how you and your family can live the healthiest life possible without being sold a shopping basket full of fake foods or candy-colored bottled waters.  This is not a passing fad. It’s a long lasting trend that is just beginning to develop as online health food store owners are leading the way for a new generation to discover a smarter way of shopping for truly all natural foods and health drinks.

Live enzymes are often mentioned in discussions about nutrition and whole foods, but what are they, why does anyone need them, and where do you get them?  Enzymes are not vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fats or protein, but they are catalysts for the chemical reactions that get those nutrients from whole foods working in the body.  While there are 1,300 different kinds of enzymes that help your body function, the most familiar are digestive enzymes.  Equally important are metabolic enzymes that are critical to burning fat and generating energy.

To understand why live enzymes are an important component of whole foods,  you should understand the definition of enzymes from The Nutrition Almanac-4th Edition (1996 McGraw Hill, Gayla J. Kirschmann and John D. Kirschmann), “The active chemicals in the digestive juices which cause the chemical breakdown of whole foods are called enzymes, combinations of amino acids that are capable of inducing chemical changes in other substances”.

As you search for the best whole foods, keep in mind that live enzymes are not nutrients like vitamins and minerals. They are catalysts, which act as biochemical agents joining two compounds so they can react with each other, while the enzyme itself remains intact.

Their importance cannot be overstated, “In short, virtually nothing happens in the body without the help of enzymes”, says Ellen W. Cutler, co-author of Micro Miracles. To make sure your body is functioning at full potential, experts agree it is a good idea to load up on whole foods that contain live enzymes.

To be certain you are getting the right digestive juices to turn nutrients into energy, search for all natural foods, especially real fruits and vegetables.  Be careful that the foods have not been overly heated.  Raw, whole foods provide the surest way to consume live enzymes.   However, there are some amazing, all natural food concentrates available today that are processed at low temperatures to keep the live enzymes intact.

Feed your body the nutrients it is crying out for, including live enzymes to absorb those whole food nutrients more effectively, and it will perform better for you over the long haul.