The Essence of Whole Grain

Whole Grain. Yeah... that's the kind of food element that I have decided to live by for breakfast &/or lunch from now onwards. This is amazing stuff, really.

White meal bread. That's a BIG no no... NO. It tastes good, soft & easy to chew. Goes well with all sorts of stuff that people put onto their bread... but I have tried them with whole meal / grain bread & wola! It works too! Tastes just as good... just that whole grain bread is slightly rougher & less chewy. But hey... this stuff works wonders!

I spent quite some time comparing food labels of all kinds of bread that the NTUC Fairprice supermarket at Simei yesterday & to no surprise... whole grain bread tops them all. Just wins hands down. No doubt about it.

There are all sorts of bread nowadays in our local supermarket, petrol kiosk mart, etc. From white meal bread, to milk bread, pandan flavoured bread, chocolate chip bread, Vitamin enriched bread, etc. In short, people are get easily bored with regular bread & now further spoilt for choice becoz pastries are a MASS everywhere! And I mean, everywhere! Let's not even mention bakery shops like Breadtalk that just throws in tray after tray of utmost concentrated white bread, in just all & every possible type of bread-like-combination dressing! In my opinion, whatever that these guys think that looks good & tastes good on bread, they just dump it in, in a whole variety of patterns & styles, just so as to capture as much market share as possible from their all-out variety explosion!

You see, that's the problem - food that tastes good & easy to eat, MAY not always be the best foods for the body. Why? Coz we begin thinking & choosing with our taste buds, rather than our brains. The more 'sinful' it is, the more people want to eat it. This is worse than Eve taking the fruit from the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. At least she took one, lived to regret it. Nowadays, people eat once, realise that its unhealthy stuff coz their waist-line gets wider, their tummy cellulite gets thicker & their energy level drops like a stone. And the best part - they continue eating it.

You know, I find it really sad that people make use of their five senses for often, what I would presume as corruption or detrimental to themselves. (1) Sight - eyeing other's possessions & getting all jealous; girls seeking attention by dressing provocatively leading to temptation. (2) Hearing - eavesdropping; loud music that deafens the ears & sometimes cause road accidents. (3) Touch - getting all comfortable on a sofa or bed & becoming all lethargic due to the lack of sufficient & proper exercise. (4) Smell & (5) Taste - like I mentioned earlier, knowing what's bad for the body, yet allow their taste buds to manipulate them, resulting in disastrous physical image & weakened health condition, then assuming that extreme dieting & slimming pills will turn things right. Sorry, slimming pills may aid in losing weight (extremely easy from a short-term outlook & long run unhealthy manner), but it sure doesn't make your body healthy nor strong. Let's see you fellas taking slimming pills all the way till age 60-70. Then tell me that your heart & body is strong enough to survive your last remaining years.

Some people say that there's no such thing as a bad carb (i.e. carbohydrate). Aha... that's becoz the books you read or study tell you what are the uses of different types of carbohydrates & how it can benefit your body by taking them. Typical nutrition type of books. Quite similar to those that I studied during my earlier school years taking Biology.

But some of these books may not tell you how it affects your bodily functions, that only experience from taking them can tell you. And you don't even need any book or talk to any nutritionist to tell you that. You will know that you have feasted upon some bad carbs when you find yourself feeling sleepy, tired, weak, blurry eyed, hazy mind or perhaps even nodding away within an hour or two.

Come on! How many can testify to this fact? I would say almost close to everyone would have experienced this before. Ask any student who gobbles down a heavy lunch meal of nasi lemak, fried food or a big bowl of noodles in laksa, curry or even just with Yong Tau Foo soup. I have seen many JC students dozing in lecture theatres (okay, perhaps the lecturer could be boring, but boredom doesn't cause physical fatigue, just sitting on your butt in a lecture theatre after a heavy bad carb meal). Just think of how many people, young & old, who have to live on caffeine to wake themselves up before going to work, taking it after lunch to stay awake & some even taking such drinks to sustain energy throughout the night, especially after another heavy dinner.

Caffeine is a drug; a stimulant. A little bit can be good, but try washing your body system with several cups of caffeinated drinks every day... eroding away essential calcium (increasing osteoporosis), using up water to flush it out, & getting your teeth stained from it. And some say iced coffee is bad... come on! They are all the same! I have drunk coffee & tea while mugging for my exams in secondary & JC school life. I turned away from it during my university mugging days, prayed for strength coz I decided that its better to trust God than trust an addictive drug & relied on pure will & determination to slog through several hours into the night. I'm not saying that "burning the midnight oil" is healthy, but I just found it a lot more peaceful & quiet to study at night. No noise, no sound... just me & my books. And I can testify that my final exam grades always surpassed my grades in tests & assessments. Every time. Well, I guess that could be how God decided to reward me for putting my trust in Him. And I can gladly say that I'm no drug addict to anything on Earth, whether perceived as good or bad in the eyes of all sorts of people in mankind.

In short, eating smart is the best way to go. Follow your mind, not your taste buds. Everyone talks about working smart, studying smart... how about incorporating eating smart? Bad carbs are bad. Anything that knocks you out in 1 - 2 hours are not really worth eating. It affects your concentration & performance at work, weakens your body organs from desperately trying to digest all these complex food (which explains why we feel so drained out after lunch) & stress out our excretion organs to expel whatever's not needed by the body. I mean, come on! We should be feeling more energized after a meal, not more tired than before! Hello! Then why eat? And get all run-down after that? Come on... don't give the crap that says "Oh... digestion take energy mah... after digesting then I'll feel energetic!" PLEASE... give me a break. I wasn't born yesterday. Our body takes hours to digest our food. And by the time your body digests this meal, it would be time for your next meal already. And if you continue to throw in bad stuff into your body. You tell me whether you will actually feel more energized & stronger after all that.

Good carbs are different. And I mean every word that I say. Good carbs are foods that you take into your body & you don't feel drowsy over the next few hours. Why? Coz good carbs take some time for our digestive system to break it down for absorption. In short, it's a gradual breakdown, digestion & absorption. Meaning that your body won't need to exert a whole lot of energy (which brings a lot of blood into those organs, leaving your mind tired out from lesser blood flowing through) to digest it in a short time. This means that you will have more energy, with absorption & release of energy from these foods, throughout intervals of the next few hours! Just like those Vitamin C capsules from GNC health stores that have the characteristic of 'Timed Release'... meaning that Vitamin C is released & absorbed by your body, at intervals throughout the day. It sure is A LOT better than those olden days Vitamin C tablets that quickly digest, resulting in also quick excretion, making our urine a little more yellowish than it would normally be.

These foods come in the form of grains, beans, nuts, etc. Somewhat similar to what birds & hamsters eat... hahahaha... just joking... but they look kind of the same, in some ways. Basically, those food stuffs that come pure from the ground. The less processed they are, the BETTER.

Of course, it's also good to pamper ourselves with deliciously 'bad' food... OCCASIONALLY. Maybe once a week. Twice a week at max. So that we don't end up eating even more bad food, once we get our hands upon our first plate. Now, that's smart eating.

Come on, we only have one body & one life to live. Let's give our bodies what's best for it. It's the only one we have... & we owe it to our organs for working TIRELESSLY all the days of our lives.