My passion lies in helping people find the path that works for them from a health perspective, and I wanted to just give each of you a round of applause for really investing in yourself and putting the time and energy in. I know we all have really crazy hectic lives these days. So, the fact that you are here reading and following through, I think you're on the right track and I'm sure that moving forward you're going to see some great changes in your life.
I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, we had a garden and we played outside. I can remember eating carrots right out of the garden. I remember, we weren't allowed to come in the house except for an hour at lunchtime to eat and watch Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. And then we had to go back outside again. We drank water from the hose. We were kind of little hooligans, but at the end of the day, we were tired, and we went to bed.
I think you could say the same for adults; if we look at our grandparents and past generations, they did a lot of similar things. They had manual labor jobs; they came home tired. It looked a little different, unfortunately, than today. Now the whole foods aren't the staple for a lot of people. It's convenient foods; it's prepackaged foods, fast food. Thankfully, we don't have as much fast food in our valley, but it's still here.
All those great outdoors games are getting replaced with screen time, video games and things like that. Sugary drinks used to be a treat. I don't know about you guys but on Sundays we would get to share a root beer between the three of us kids with dad and a Kit Kat and it was a special treat. But today those sugary drinks and things have become a staple for people because we're tired in a new way, not a physically exhausted way, but emotionally we're drained. We just kind of have this, like almost like a low, I wouldn't say depression, but we are just more lethargic than we used to be.
Take a second to reflect on how you're taking care of yourself. Are you eating real foods? Drinking regular water? There are a lot of fancy drinks out there these days, but our bodies really need water. Do you sleep 7 to 8 hours a night? There are a lot of really amazing things that happen while we sleep, and scientists, even today, don't truly understand everything that's going on when we sleep. Our body is doing a lot of repair work.
Our hormones are able to get back into the places they need to be in stabilizing our body.
Unfortunately, we have a couple of terms that are happening in our world that are really, even if people who are cognizant of their health and want to make improvements, are kind of setting us back a step without us really having much of a say about it. And the first one of those are environmental toxins that are constantly increasing. So even though we live in this beautiful place here in Colorado, you know the water we're drinking, the air we're breathing, the lotions we're putting on our skin, the food we're putting in our body, everything contains some level of toxicity. So, that's something I really want to focus on in our discussion tonight. So that's the first thing that is very alarming to me. They've done studies where they're looking at umbilical cord blood of babies and how many toxins are in there from day one in babies. I mean hundreds if not thousands of toxins are showing up in umbilical cord blood.
And that's when kids are getting their start.
So to me, that's alarming as a relatively new mom and then the other trend is that as we've been hearing our food quality is decreasing. You walk into the grocery store and if you look at city Market, it's probably 75% of the pre-made packaged things . All of it contains emulsifiers, flavor enhancers. I don't know if you can even read or understand some of the ingredients. It's really food products; they're not truly food anymore.
Those two things are really setting us back. And then even when we get to the point of raising our consciousness and understanding about the things we've been taught about whole food nutrition, we're still at a disadvantage. We live in a country that's greatly over farming soils; nutrients in our soils are being depleted and then top that off with the fact that you could live in Florida and be getting oranges in your grocery store from California or if you think about the banana, it wasn't nice and yellow and ripe when they picked it off that tree; it was very green. It was picked before all of that nutrition, and those phytonutrients were able to develop and put on a truck or a ship or plane, who knows how it got here. It took maybe 3-4 days, maybe a week to get to the grocery store and then into your mouth. We're learning that, within five days, even up to 50% of that nutrient content is depleting in our fruits and vegetables, so it's frustrating because even though we're trying to do the right thing, we still have to eat even more.
When I was a kid, I think 5 to 7 servings of fruits and vegetables was the recommended amount. Now, if you take a look at your fist as the size of a serving and I want you to physically do this because I feel like the visual connection is important,7 to 13 servings a day of fruits and vegetables and if you're an athlete, if you're someone who's really physical, keep counting. That number goes up even more and I don't know about you, but who eats 7 to 13 fruits and vegetables a day? I have a picture of what that looks like physically and maybe if you're on a fully plant based diet you might be in the 10% of Americans who actually do that on a daily basis.
I think all of us probably know we should be eating more fruits and veggies. We've been learning about that; we get it and it's something that Americans and the world in general have recognized too. But foods are nutrition deficient. So a lot of you go think, “Well let's take a vitamin.” If I'm not getting the vitamin C from the orange, I'll get it from a pill; but in reality the body doesn't recognize that; you don't find 2000 milligrams of vitamin C in that form in nature.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away. An apple has 400 different phytonutrients that scientists have been able to identify but they actually think there's more like 10,000. So if you think about trying to replicate that in a multivitamin that maybe has like 20 different things, it just doesn't compute. It's not the same thing as whole foods. We do have a deficiency but It's not a vitamin deficiency; It's a whole food deficiency.
If we think about a sliced apple in half, it starts to get brown and really what that's showing is oxidation occurring. Those cells are becoming damaged, maybe they're dying. Whatever's happening to them, but if you took half of the apple and squirted lemon juice on it, that doesn't happen because that lemon has a ton of antioxidants in it. So the same thing is happening on the inside of our bodies. So our cells from all those toxins in our environment and our food, our cells are constantly getting bombarded by different mutagenic oxidants inside of our body.
If we're not doing anything, you start aging and get disease, which is kind of like the browning of the apple. But the great message here is that there is hope. We know that by cramming more and more antioxidants into our body we can combat a lot of these things. We can combat a lot of chronic diseases and aging. I know plenty of people that have been on plant based diets for 20-30 years and they're the youngest looking people I've ever met in my life. I walk into a room full of them and I want to be them. It may be superficial; but hey, who doesn’t want to look younger longer? It's not a bad thing and obviously this is a contributing factor. We can all think of probably a handful of people in our lives that have cancer or cardiovascular disease, Arthritis and many numbers of things that are happening at the cellular level. This is how toxics affect your health.
Obviously we all want to avoid disease and you know aging slower would be nice. But what we're here to talk about is how this interacts in our bodies when it comes to managing our health. And I really didn't understand this until the last few years of my life, and it's been very eye opening for me.
Toxics affect your health...
Good nutrition helps everything. You start putting more plants in your body and it's going to help in a myriad of areas because it really is a lifestyle.I love to grow food. I hate going into the grocery store right now and buying lettuce that you have to look through and find one that's not slimy and gross in the middle of winter. I love opening people's eyes to the power of plants. I used to honestly laugh at people when they even suggested that I stopped eating meat and I would say I'm like a 75/25 person. My family hunts; we eat wild game. That is part of our diet. But embracing this has really been a game changer for me, and I think we could all agree that banking on health insurance and banking on those types of things being around for us really isn't a safe bet these days. We truly have to take our health into our own hands. I think you're all doing that. So I applaud you for being here and hopefully some of this hits home with you and avoid affect your health.