The Oppenheimer Report 7/15/19

Of late, I haven’t been eating properly, and the older I get, the less forgiving my body has become when I neglect it. Over the years, I’ve learned a bit about nutrition, and I’m beginning to listen to my body. While I’m no expert, I know a lot more about t now than I did when I was younger. Lately I’ve been reading up on the gut and the digestive process. I now understand that the gut is command central for the body’s auto-immune system. Because Shauna has Crohn’s Disease, and a series of perplexing auto-immune illnesses that are likely related to the Crohn’s, I am trying to learn what foods are both nutritious and not hard on her digestion. Of course, there is no substitute for good, nutritious foods, preferably organic, which are low in harmful fats and preservatives. That said, it’s getting harder and harder to figure out what foods are good for us to eat. While we’re getting better at producing larger quantities of food, we are in some cases sacrificing quality. With a growing number of genetically modified foods, and the use of potentially harmful chemicals and fertilizers to grow those foods, it’s getting harder and harder to I know what is good for my body. Wheat is a good example and wheat products seem to be a bigger problem today than they used to be. I never heard about gluten allergies thirty years ago, but now I hear about them all the time. Again, there seems to be some correlation to the gut and to autoimmune health.

Like a lot of people, I don’t eat enough vegetables or fibre, and of late I have been adding inulin to my coffee (brand name Benefibre) and a green powder dietary supplement that I mix with fruit juice. That powder includes things like spirulina, wheat grass, and a bunch of ingredients that I can’t pronounce, but which allegedly provide some of the phytonutrients that I am lacking in my diet. It also turns whatever I mix it with into an unappetizing army green colour. I am constantly trying new fruit juices that I mix with the powder. I like lemonade, and on a whim bought a bottle of lemonade with watermelon mixed in. That is not a good combination, but just about any other fruit juices work well. It seems to be helping, and I have come to realize that preventative medicine is the best medicine. I don’t delude myself by thinking that dietary supplements will ensure my good health; there are plenty of environmental and genetic factors that are out of my control. That said, I’ve spent a lot of time attending to other friends and family in hospitals over the past twenty years, and I’ll do anything I can to avoid ending up in a hospital.   

When I still lived in Buffalo, I was the long-time board member and volunteer for Meals On Wheels of Buffalo And Erie County. The organization fed over 1400 home-bound clients per day. In the ten or more years that I was actively involved with that organization I learned a thing or two about geriatric nutrition. A lot of the seniors I served were on low sodium diets, and that’s a deal breaker for me. One day, after I and my server had finished our route, we had one low sodium meal left over. I’d been delivering these meals for years, and had never sampled one myself, so rather than let it go to waste, I ate it. It was awful. It is remarkable how tasteless some foods are without salt. That said, I’ve begun to read product labels in the supermarket, a habit I got into when I was buying food for Shauna’s elderly parents. There is too much salt in just about everything, even in some desserts!  One can of a soup I used to buy contains the maximum recommended amount of salt a person should ingest in a day. As we all know, too much salt and sugar can be killers.   

As Joni Mitchell so wisely pointed out in her song Big Yellow Taxi, “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.” Like so many others in my ever-expanding demographic, as I approach my golden years I am increasingly mindful harmful effects of bad food and a sedentary lifestyle. I know what to do. The trick is to practice what I preach.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer ©2019
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
jamieoppenheimersongwriter@gmail.com

Jamie Oppenheimer, Songwriter, Author, Blogger, Radio Producer, & Host has been writing THE OPPENHEIMER REPORT every MONDAY since 1992 and has published the articles on his blog since 2006. We are including Jamie's weekly reports, as a new feature of #HuntersBayRadio, The Bay 88.7FM.
#GotLocal? HuntersBayRadio.com #WeAreMuskoka #WeAreAlmaguin