How Vegetables And Fruit Work For Our Health
My son and I were in our garden we planted over at Ron’s house a while back talking about eggplant we picked that we had planted earlier. I thought about vegetables and fruits and how they work in our bodies for our health. As I saw these colors from our harvest I wondered if there was any coincidence that vegetables and fruits are so beautiful and so good for us. One of the most obvious characteristics of plants is their wide range of spectacular colors. If you admire how food is presented, it’s hard to beat a plate of fruits and vegetables. There’s a plethora of plants to color your world with health, mother nature’s palate. Just follow the rainbow and it will lead you to the pot of gold you’re searching for abundant health. You need physical health for energy to run your business. There’s a beautiful, scientifically sound story behind this color/health link.
Whether you believe in God, evolution or just coincidence, you must admit that this is a beautiful, almost spiritual, example of nature’s wisdom.
The colors of vegetables and fruits are derived from a variety of chemicals called antioxidants. These chemicals are almost exclusively found in plants and are linked to better mental performance in old age.
Living plants illustrate nature’s beauty, both in color and in chemistry. They take the energy of the sun and transform it into life through the photosynthesis process. In this process, the sun’s energy is first turned into simple sugars, and then into more complex carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.
This complex process amounts to some pretty high-powered activity with the plant, all of which is driven by the exchange of electrons between molecules.
And since I promised to keep things simple, I’ll let the scientist, T. Colin Campbell, PhD explain the rest of this process. As he describes, electrons are the medium of energy transfer. The site at which photosynthesis takes place is a bit like a nuclear reactor. The electrons zooming around in the plant that are changing the sunlight into chemical energy must be managed very carefully. If they stray from their rightful places in the process, they may create free radicals, which can wreak havoc in the plant. It would be like the core of a nuclear reactor leaking radioactive materials (free radicals) that can be dangerous to surrounding area.
So how does the plant manage these complex reactions and protect against errant electrons and free radicals? It puts up a shield around potentially dangerous reactions that sponges up these highly reactive substances. The shield is made of antioxidants that intercept and scavenge electrons that might otherwise stray from their course.
Antioxidants are colored because the same chemical property that sponges up excess electrons also creates visible colors.
Some of these antioxidants are called carotenoids, of which there are hundreds. They vary in color from the yellow color of squash, to the red color of tomatoes, to the color of oranges.
What makes this remarkable process relevant for us animals, is that we produce low levels of free radicals throughout our lifetime. Being exposed to the sun’s rays, to certain industrial pollutants and to improperly balanced nutrient intakes creates a background of unwanted free radical damage. Free radicals are nasty. They can cause our tissues to become rigid and limited in their function. It’s a bit like old age, when our bodies become creaky and stiff. This uncontrolled free radical damage is part of the processes that give rise to cataracts, hardening of the arteries, cancer, emphysema, arthritis and many other ailments that become common with age.
The kicker is we don’t naturally build shields to protect ourselves against free radicals. As we aren’t plants, we don’t carry out photosynthesis and therefore don’t produce our own antioxidants. Fortunately the antioxidants in plants work in our bodies the same way they work in plants.
It is a wonderful harmony. The plants make the antioxidant shields, and at the same time make them look incredibly appealing with beautiful, appetizing colors. Then we animals, in turn, are attracted to the plants and eat them borrowing their antioxidant shields for our own health.
I included the above for all you scientific brains; all that is way too analytical for me. I just thought the vegetables were pretty and I had no idea how powerful they were, did you?