Spring has sprung and we’re well on the way to the end of the year. I’m sure some of you have started some form of spring-cleaning, whether it’s throwing out your kids’ old, too small winter clothes, or maybe a detox with certain types of food. Moving away from stodgy casseroles and stews and onto salads and BBQs now the weather has warmed up. It’s a beautiful time of year and much more conducive to enjoying time with your kids in the outdoors. Its also a busy time for farmers, getting ready for wheat harvest, voting in the wool poll and either hoping for rain, or that it holds off.
Spring is also a great time to shrug off your winter coat, clothing wise and health wise. Summer is coming and we would all like to look forward to running around in the long summer holidays with the kids. To be able to do this we have to be active, healthy good role models for our kids, encouraging sport, healthy eating and plenty of time outside in the sunshine.
In Spring we can unclutter our eating habits in the same way we can unclutter our kitchens/bedrooms. While you are airing your doonas, cleaning your windows, clearing out cupboards and packing up your winter clothes you can prepare for some spring cleaning of our bodies as well.
Cleaning up our eating habits, is not only beneficial for our waistlines but putting good healthy fresh food into our bodies has a number of benefits to do with our emotional, mental and physical wellbeing.
NUTRITION
“To detox through diet, you need to first eliminate or minimize the supply of toxins that are having an effect on you and therefore causing symptoms of toxic overload,” recommends nutrition specialist Dr Libby Ellis. (Mindfood.com, 2012)
Sarah Wilson, media personality, former editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine and nutritionist offers her Top Five Tips for Spring Cleaning as follows:
- 1. Get plenty of sleep
- 2. Eat ginger. And other digestive herbs and spices as much as you can: cumin, fennel, cayenne pepper, and turmeric.
- 3. Drink digestive teas. Licorice, fennel, mint, dandelion
- 4. Eat green. As much as you can. Green cleans; Silverbeet, spinach, broccoli, beans, avocado, cucumber, mint, parsley, basil.
- 5. Ease up on stimulants like coffee and alcohol.
Eating well and eliminating toxins is not only good for adults in helping us get healthier and slimmer, it can be important for our children as well. Recently on our Facebook wall we posted about the Four Corner’s episode “The Autism Enigma”. This episode looked at the some of the possible explanations for the rise in the rates of diagnosed autism and the possible links to environmental factors. The episode was filmed in the United States, UK and Canada and looked at a controversial theory examining the possible links between harmful bacteria in a child’s gut and Autism. Whatever your thoughts are on this controversial theory, there is plenty of scientific evidence, which explores the relationship between our guts and our overall physical and mental health.
Gut health is a term increasingly used in the medical literature and the food industry. “It covers multiple aspects of the gastrointestinal tract, such as the effective digestion and absorption of food, the absence of GI illness, normal and stable intestinal microbiota, effective immune status and a state of well-being.” (Stephan C Bischoff, Institute of Nutritional Medicine, Germany, March 2011, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/9/24)
Gut health and its effect on other parts of the body is a relationship that has been researched in depth by the Mindd Foundation a non-profit Health Promotion Trust set up by a team of medical doctors and health care professionals. The organization believes that some disorders such as Autism, asthma, eczema, Dyslexia, digestive disorders (amongst others) are on the rise due to environmental factors such as pollution, food, medications and stress that denigrate cellular health. They explain that Hippocrates (an ancient Greek physician c.460BC) said, “All diseases begin in the gut.”
In an article published in MindFood in 2008, Dr Sascha Elliot a well-known naturopathic physician explains, “Even the health of our skin is linked to the health of our gut”. Dr. Elliot has some encouraging news though; “The good news is you can make small, everyday changes that will dramatically improve your health and wellbeing by enhancing your body’s natural process of detoxification. By minimizing your intake of toxins and, at the same time, eliminating them externally through dietary modification, body treatments, exercise, rest and relaxation, you’ll be giving your body a great spring-clean.”
Disclaimer: The information contained in these blog posts are not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, it is provided for informational purposes only.You assume full responsibility for how you choose to use this information.
Resources:
Mindd Foundation, 2012
Sarah Wilson Blog, 2011
Mind Food, 2008
Four Corners, The Autism Enigma, August 31, 2012
BMC Medicine, ‘Gut health’: a new objective in medicine?