Sustainable Living at Total Nutrition & Therapeutics

Most of us want to be healthier and see a healthier world. The folks here at Total Health & Nutrition are taking steps on a daily basis to do just that. For some, this involves trying to recycle plastics in their own home. Others take their steps more literally, ensuring that they hit that 10,000-step mark we hear so much about. Today, we’re going to focus on sustainable living and eating. 

Sustainable living and eating focuses on foods, animals, and resources that can be cultivated directly from the earth and recycled through it again without harm to either you or the environment. Sustainable living is about so much more than being self-reliant. According to our functional medicine experts here at Total Nutrition & Therapeutics, it’s the holy grail of health and wellness. Read on to find out why we refer to sustainability as a nutritional and spiritual superpower.

What Is Sustainable Living & Eating

On the surface, sustainability is about limiting our negative impact on our planet. From limiting our imprint on our land to the proper treatment of livestock, sustainability is a massive effort. 

Today, we’d like to focus more on how sustainable living and eating can save your life along with Earth’s. Namely, sustainability ensures that you maximize your nutritional intake and absorption rate. As an added bonus, you can rest assured that you’re making the world a better place!

Sustainability: A Symbiotic Relationship Between You & The Earth

Many of us know about the macro benefits of sustainability. Growing our own fruits and vegetables or sourcing them from sustainable outfits limits our reliance on agribusiness. Mass-farming methods destroy our plowable soil and deprive our food of nutrients. Eating ethically-sourced meat subverts the mass suffering of livestock.

Sustainability creates a symbiotic relationship between you and the environment. Meaning, these actions have incredibly positive effects on you as well. Growing your own fruits and vegetables preserves nutrients and rids your food of pesticides and preservatives. Eating meat from farms that fed their chickens and cows real food translates to better nutritional value for you as well.

Sustainable living is a win-win situation—and for more reasons than you might think.

Sustainability’s Many Flavors

One of the best aspects of sustainable eating is the variety it offers your dining experience. Here at Total Nutrition, we promote countless ideas for spicing things up.

Juice!

Juicing has to be near the top of our list of favorite sustainable eating strategies. The possibilities are truly endless. However, though fruit can be beneficial in moderation, here at Total Nutrition we encourage patients to shift toward vegetable-based juice blends. Due to their incredible health benefits, some of our favorite juices include:

• celery 
• green 
• Kale
• spinach 
• Chard
• beets 
• carrot 

Vegetable juices of all kinds can be far more delicious than many imagine. The sweetness in carrots and beets can make a banana smoothie seem overindulgent. 

Herbs & Spices

Many folks fear sustainable eating because they believe, falsely, that their diet will become plain and bland. Of infinite reasons to the contrary, the prospect of growing or sourcing organically grown herbs and spices rests near the top of the list.

There’s perhaps nothing more conducive to a sustainable lifestyle than a solid lineup of herbs and spices. The folks here at Total Nutrition have a field day (literally) sourcing or harvesting their own wide selection of herbs and spices. A little bit of homegrown nutmeg goes a long way with those pure-honeyed yams on Thanksgiving.

Actual Flavor

Many people don’t realize what they’ve been missing until they go fully sustainable. When you’re used to eating chemically-infused, diluted foods from the supermarket, it’s impossible to know what you’re missing out on.

A sustainable diet reminds our taste buds what food is supposed to taste like. Tomatoes grown from unadulterated soil, free-range cows fed actual grass, herbs and spices given the care they deserve—going sustainable makes it impossible to ever go back.

Sustainability’s Health Benefits

Earlier, we mentioned the symbiotic relationship sustainability creates between you and the earth. Let’s take a moment to talk more about how it benefits you.

Put simply, the food we eat from the supermarket is either infused with unhealthy elements or flat-out unhealthy—if not outright deadly. From fruits and vegetables pumped with chemicals and diluted of their nutrients to processed foods saturated with sugar and trans fats, there’s no escaping the horrors of our modern food system. 

Sustainability doesn’t only free you from these horrors, but it also opens the door to a world of endless nutritional possibilities that can turn your life around.

Microgreens & Veggies

Last year at this time, Total Nutrition released a blog about microgreens. In it we explained that vegetables are much like humans in a certain way. Us humans have our childhood and teenage periods in which we’re full of vitality and energy. Similarly, plants have their pubescent periods in which they’re bursting with nutrients and minerals, much more so than when they’re mature and ripe. When harvested early, they provide many, many times the nutrients as they’re mature counterparts.

This goes for nearly all vegetables, not just greens. By simply cultivating and harvesting these edible plants earlier than conventional wisdom would have them, we’re able to provide our bodies with superhuman levels of health and nutrition.

The Only Real Cure

The world—and, in particular, the West—has a real problem with pills and palliatives. We think everything can be solved by the contents of little orange prescription bottles.

Modern medicine is truly a miracle. We have the ability to stop diabetes in its tracks, put cancer on pause, and perform open-heart surgeries that save countless lives. The only problem is that we often use these medicines and procedures as a crutch. Cancer, diabetes, and heart disease are all caused or exacerbated by diet—a Western diet that’s dependent on chemically altered, nutritionally diluted, and processed foods.

Here at Total Nutrition & Therapeutics, we have patients come in with all sorts of ailments. Some of them are more severe than others. Some have been resistant to the best doctors and medicines in the world. In the large majority of cases, upon switching to a sustainable lifestyle, our patients realize miracles they never thought possible, such as eliminating the need for the palliative and, sometimes, even what was thought to be essential medicines previous to changing to a sustainable diet. 

The difference between real nutrition and our corrupted food system is massive. The modern diet is a vicious cycle of empty calories, inflammation, and gastrointestinal issues. Sustainability is a healthy relationship with foods that quite literally bring life back to your body’s essential processes.

Total Nutrition

Total Nutrition & Therapeutics believes firmly in functional medicine, which takes a holistic view to health and wellness—it’s what we think of as Total Nutrition. We see equal value in all elements of our health plan, from diet and exercise to psychological and spiritual maintenance. 

When it comes to sustainable living, it’s difficult to avoid evangelizing. By simply switching to foods that are grown and raised naturally, without artificial development, mass scale, and heavy processing, some of the most health-challenged patients we have ever seen have completely turned their lives around.

As mentioned earlier, sustainable living and eating is anything but a glorified path to self-reliance. It’s that, and a door to a brand new life full of energy, wellbeing, and a symbiotic relationship with our planet.

---

Contact Total Nutrition and Therapeutics for more about Sustainable Living & Eating!

As the world becomes more health conscious, we continue to entrench ourselves deeper into a corrupted food system. The food we eat on a daily basis is largely processed and chemicalized. Sustainable living and eating requires a little more mindfulness and preparation, but it’s perhaps the most important change you can make to your life. Visit our website for more information on sustainability today!