For all of you who
have been able to take flattening the curve to your home life, facing
challenges that bring out the worst in us with the armour of patience for your
children, or dexterity in providing for your families; perhaps you have gone
the extra mile to make sure you have healthy food and made choices that calm
the anxiety and brighten that silver lining on the clouds of 2020 - we salute
you! It's been a tough year and you have gained new perspectives and if you
have unexpected decisions to make, you can find comfort in the fact that you
are not alone!
Flattening the curve is a call to action we have been hearing about
since the outbreak of Covid19 and though it applies more intensely to
containing a pathogen, it has taught me something of other things too.
We are
living in interesting times. Our lives are like samples of a typical and
fictional end-of-times event show. Fake NEWS blurs politics, leaders compete
with gamers for followers and a global pandemic has just cost an entire year
for everyone all over the world. Flattening the curve has started to apply in
some other instances of daily life now, like an internalised mental meme.
I blame
the reality of staying at home to minimise contact because at the same time it
is a bit like a reality show meeting your family, or yourself, for the first
time in terms of spending so much time together. This reality has maximised the
highs and lows in an arena quite unfamiliar. So in short, we have all got new
curves with new highs and lows.
Flattening
the curves of emotion from desperate and relieved to a constant sense of
security can as easily be achieved with a good diet as with the proverbial
happiness that money brings. You can also flatten the curves of your fear of
the future by staying informed and thinking things through before digesting
some of the conspiracies that keep you up at night.
When you
take charge of your health - mind, body and spirit, you help yourself with
flexing your coping muscles. When you are strong in yourself, you flatten the curve
of the negative impact on your environment and on the people around you. The
reward for your effort is feeling great, optimistic and secure in your mind,
body and spirit.
Foods
that support good gut health is a good place to start; it exists in the power
you have in directly choosing what you put in your body.
You
probably already know about fresh fruits and vegetables, believe everything you
Grandma told you, it's all true, but there are food groups that you might not
realise are being left out of your diet like bitters for tonics (like herbal
teas) and fermented foods like sauerkraut or fermented drinks like kefir.
Did you
ever wonder why different foods are more or less healthy than others? There is
plenty of info to be found on the different food groups, here are some
forgotten truths.
Fruits and vegetables give you vitamins and minerals in a juicy form but
with just the right roughage, or fibre, to balance all the sugar.
Grains and starches give you energy but again, best served with all
their natural roughage for best results.
Bitters are often tonics to help you get
better after illness or better yet, boost your immune system to fight off
illness.
The best
ignored food group of all though, is the fermented food group and it is a
shame because some of the most delicious (and healthy) foods belong in this
category. Kombucha, sauerkraut and 'real'
cultured yoghurt, to name a few but kefir is by far the most generous of them
all and I will tell you why. Kefir has more than 20 good bacteria strains that
your body needs to work properly and drinking kefir can significantly improve,
dare I say, flatten the curves on a number of areas of your life if you just
give it a chance.
A
healthy gut culture (the trillions of healthy bacteria living in symbiotic
peace and prosperity in your digestive tract) is a vital part of preventing
common and chronic disease as well as relieving constipation, hydration,
allergies, anxiety and skin problems. You could just be missing out on a key
ingredient to making your healthy diet a curve
flattening tool, whichever kind of curve you want to flatten. These good gut bacteria are
called probiotics and to
come around and back to all that roughage, or fibre, these probiotics
need to eat and the roughage, or prebiotics,
are just that - food for your gut-culture!
If you
are showing up to make good health a priority the natural way, for yourself as
well as for your family, then you are doing your part as a citizen of the whole
globe to ease the burden of our shared plight and flatten the curve on the
effects of threats to our longevity.
Find
delicious milk or water kefir, flavoured or just natural, from NuMEsa
Foods, online
or from any of their stockists in Johannesburg, Pretoria or Durban.
We at NuMEsa
believe
a healthy tummy means a happy life!
Written
by
Viv
Brown
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