Are You Suffering from Nutritional Stress?

06 Nov Are You Suffering from Nutritional Stress?

Do you feel more lethargic than usual (sleepy, groggy, or dizzy)? Do you feel like you are sick more often than you used to be? You may be suffering unnecessarily. Here at SuperLife, I am dedicated to bringing you the highest quality information on health and wellness to help you achieve your own SuperLife.

Today, I want to discuss nutritional stress as it relates to you. With heart disease, diabetes, cancer and obesity on the rise, we are in dire need to readdress the conventions of what defines the standard American diet. In the United States, our diet has grown to be largely composed of nutrient-deficient, over-processed, and genetically modified (GM) food. More and more scientific studies are starting to show the harmful, long-term impact that over processed and over manipulated food is having on our bodies.

Fake sugars and stripped white flours in our food, for example, as well as environmental toxins in our water and homes are contributing to the breakdown and accelerated aging of our population by essentially ‘damaging our chromosomes.” Our chromosomes are responsible for passing on and replicating our DNA from cell to cell. When these are damaged or inhibited, we age. [For more in-depth conversation on this subject, read about it in my upcoming book SuperLife: The Five Forces that will make You Healthy, Fit and Eternally Awesome]. Add in the over-dose of xenobiotics (foreign, man-made, unnatural chemicals) and synthetic flavors, colors, preservatives, pesticides, and herbicides in our food and we have a large dosage of food staples that are both highly toxic and unusable by the body’s natural processes. The result is nutritional stress on your body, which I would like more than anything to help alleviate from your life. The first step to countering nutritional stress is educating yourself. So, today I want to share a few delightful morsels regarding a special superfood that, in its purest form, is both incredibly healthy for you. It is also a delicacy celebrated in cultures worldwide. Not to mention just about everyone loves it (unless they have an allergy). 

CACAO POWDER. I have traveled extensively in the study of this fascinating plant through various agricultural establishments across Peru, Mexico, Tanzania, Uganda, Philippines, Indonesia, and Brazil. For a mental picture, the cacao bean is the seed of the cacao fruit. To access the seed, there is first a hard outer covering. Cracking the covering open exposes a honeycomb-like structure made of the seeds covered in a white sweet pulp. To be made edible, it must be fermented. It is these fermented beans that are the main components of chocolate (however, not necessarily the chocolate we know today with the sad additions of refined sugars, binders, stabilizers, and colorings. Over-processed “chocolate” will not give you the rich health benefits of true cacao). Here are three fascinating ways adding organic cacao in your diet can have a potent, positive effect:

• Contains broad-range antioxidants that work to fight against free radical damage in the body
• Cacao’s phytochemical composition has possible benefits to the brain in learning and memory capacities, increased energy, and blood pressure regulation
• Anandamide. A unique compound in cacao that stimulates motivation and pleasure sites in the brain; linked to current studies examining anandamide’s ability to inhibit breast cancer cell proliferation

I typically sprinkle cacao powder over a warm, whole-grain breakfast bowl of oats, African teff, or fonio, or simply add into a superfood smoothie. Have you tried real, wild, or 100% organic cacao powder? How do you like to use it, and how does it make you feel? Share with me what you think in a COMMENT below.

WHERE TO HUNT IT DOWN:

Purchase this staple superfood from a quality-assured company that has my stamp of approval — Big Tree Farms – on AMAZON today! I also created Vegan Chocolate Shakeology, which contains cacao.

Love How You Live,

Darin Olien