Blood group comes from the heredity of foods and their genes, and it’s closely related to the immune system of human body. According to medical statistical researches, many diseases are closely tight up with blood group. Blood group is inherited and represents contributions from both parents. In general, we inherit from either that of the father or the mother (such as group A, group O or group B), or the combination of both parents (such as group AB). If the father is of group A and mother is of group B, then the child can be that of group A, group B or group AB. He or she is also possible to take group O.
A little story here: Long time ago, human beings were herbivores or vegetarians, having the blood group that eats vegetables and fruits – group A. Their blood tends to be more alkaline. They are generally conservative, calm, and good at controlling themselves. Then there was a flood. People lost their land and were unable to eat vegetables and fruits. So, they moved uphill and started to hunt for animals. Meats made their blood to become acidic. To accommodate to the new environment, their blood group changed from group A to group O, the blood group that eats meat. People of blood group O have more acidic blood, and are generally crude, straightforward, easy to get angry and active.
After the flood, human beings brought the tamed animals back to the flat land and fed them there. They also started cultivation, started to exchange goods and trade for businesses. This enabled them to have the opportunity to taste variety of foods, and thus their diet became more balanced. Their blood group changed to group B, a more neutral blood. People of blood group B are generally more amiable, suave and friendly.
As people started to travel from one place to another for business trading, blood groups A, O and B started to mix through marriage. A new blood group AB was created as a result. Blood group AB is very unstable, as it can be converted back to A, B or O at their following generation. As such, people of blood group AB are generally having unstable moods and characteristics. They can be calm at one time but suddenly turn to become furious. They are sometimes amiable but self-centered.
Not only blood group affects our characteristics and personalities, it also determines what we should eat in order to stay healthy, for we will get sick if we eat wrongly. We should consider diet that matches our blood group.
As we all know, in order to maintain a healthy and strong immune system, we have to strive to provide our body with balanced and sufficient nutrition such as carbohydrate, protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, water and so on. However, each and every nutrient has different impact to our body. Some people might need more carbohydrate while others need lesser to maintain better health.
For instance, some people might need substantially more protein but lesser fat in their diet. However, in order to maintain so-called balanced diet and nutritional intake, these people eat everything. As such, their bodies are now lacking of sufficient protein and are thus unable to produce adequate immune cells. On the other hand, the excess intake of fat makes the immune cells to react slower in their bodies.
Excessive intake of a particular nutrient might improve the health of certain type of people. But in contrary, it might affect the health of other type of people. That is, every one of us has our very personal nutritional requirements. The so-called balanced nutrition should be taken according to individual body’s needs, rather than identical to everybody.
To maintain better health and have stronger immune system, there is this practice proclaiming that we need to eat according to our individual blood group, or blood type.
What do you normally drink when you have sore throat? Try Honey Lemon Juice if you haven’t tried so.
Why? Honey has soothing, healing and anti-microbial properties that will bring quicker relief to the throat. Lemons contain a substantial amount of Vitamin C that speeds up the healing process and also help to cut mucus.
How to make it? Mix a teaspoon of honey into a glass of warm water. Add at least two (2) teaspoons of lemon juice and mix it thoroughly. Drink once daily until sore throat is cured.
Tip: Do not use boiling hot water as it will destroy some of the properties of the honey.
After knowing the evildoing of trans fats, some people asked me if it’s alright to continue eating, say fast food, but on occasional basis. For example, instead of once or more weekly, now change to once every fortnightly or monthly.
Do you drive a car? Do you know what runs a car? Yes, car runs on petrol. When fuel level in a car is low, we drive the car to the petrol station to fill in petrol, so that the fuel level is up again and we can continue driving the car. Do we fill the car with liquid other than petrol?
Imagine this: Every time when we pump petrol to the car, we mix the petrol with one small cup of plain water, or coffee, or tea, or coke, can the car still run? Yes, it can, at first. Continuing to mix the petrol with plain water (or any other liquid) once in awhile thereafter, do you think the car will break down one day because of what we fill it up with?
Now, have you got the answer to the question at the beginning of this post?
When car breaks down or koyak, we can change to a new one. And this time, we’ll never feed it with other stuff except with petrol. But can we change a new body when our body breaks down and let everything restarts again?
Since margarine is so bad, why was it being developed in the first place? Well, scientists didn’t think so at the very beginning. Over 100 years ago, the Americans had started to realize that eating animal fats such as cream, lard and butter could clog the arteries, thus should switch to consuming vegetable oils instead. But Americans liked to have toast with butter or potato with cream spread on top, and vegetable oils that were in liquid form made it difficult for them. To cater for this need, food manufacturers brought corn oils, soybean oil, sunflower seed oils and other vegetable oils to the laboratory for processing. By using the hydrogenating process, food manufacturers were able to convert liquid vegetable oils to solid form under room temperature. And by adding in artificial colouring and flavouring, the taste of this butter substitute has become as good as the original butter.
The food manufacturers initially thought that this butter substitute would have gotten rid of all the bad stuff found in animal fats. However, recent researches discovered that this man-made butter substitute, or margarine, has problems far worse than animal fats themselves. No doubt those animal fats do have their problems, but so long as we consume more vegetable and fruits, coupled that with regular exercises, these problems can be overcome. On the other hand, as margarine is developed through process of hydrogenation, the fat has turned to become trans fat that our body is unable to metabolize (as like the nature cannot decompose plastic materials). It is like planting a time bomb inside our body, thus it is worse than animal fat like butter.Due to the awareness and unpopularity of trans fats, the Americans have started to reduce trans fats in their diet as much as they can. For example, McDonald’s in the USA has claimed to stop using hydrogenated shortening (trans fats) in their products. But is McDonald’s in Malaysia also doing the same? And what about other products that contain trans fats, such like crackers, potato chips, cookies, popcorns, cakes and breads that some of us eat daily?
Oh, I think we still need to eat this plastic stuff for sometimes…
For the past few decades, due to the influence of the western diet, we take bread and butter as breakfast. Subsequently, people starting to say that butter is not good, so we switch to margarine instead. Developed as a butter substitute, as margarine is made with vegetable oils, people consider anything that is plant or vegetable-based is better. Over prolonged period of time, this has created a lot of health problems such as high blood pressures, high cholesterol, heart attack, stroke, allergies, reduced body immunity, obesity and so on.
Margarine is not any healthier than cream and butter. Developed over 100 years ago, margarine is made by hydrogenating edible vegetable oil (adding hydrogen to vegetable oil so to make it in solid form at room temperature and has longer shelf life), and thus making it to contain Trans Fatty Acids, or Trans Fats. As we learnt from The plastic fats: Trans Fats, trans fats are almost non-existent in the natural world, and our human body simply cannot decompose them naturally. Consuming trans fats is like consuming plastic itself, we should thus avoid it as much as we can. However, there are still many people out there mistake trans fats as good stuff. And like going for an all-you-can-eat buffet meal, they simply eat as much as they can. Sadly to say, they actually don’t know they are eating ‘plastic’ (trans fats).
Hydrogenated vegetable oil is the worst oil that we can take. If we have allergies, cardiovascular and other diseases, we must stop eating trans fats, or at least avoid consuming much. Even if we are healthy now, we should also learn to reduce the consumption of trans fats. Otherwise, our health will deteriorate overtime.
Maybe some of us are unaware of this fact, that consuming trans fats is almost like eating plastic, or swallowing chewing gum. This is because trans fats, plastic and chewing gum are all man-made products, and they are non-existent on earth. They are nearly non-biodegradable too. How come we don’t eat plastic or chewing gum but consume trans fats on the other hand?
Take a look at this video excerpt, at the bottom of this paragraph, from a documentary titled “Super Size Me,” where they carried an experiment to see how the McDonald's foods stay after 10 weeks. They purchased some McDonald’s burgers and fries, and regular burger and fries from the street, put them all inside transparent glass containers individually, and see how long the food would take to decompose. As the experiment goes on, we can see that all the buns and meats have got rotted overtime, but the fries still stay fresh looking, as if they were just being bought on the day itself. Even molds and bacteria don’t want to eat the trans fats that are covering the fries (trans fats prolong the shelf life of the fries), so why do we human beings eat them? After taking trans fats into our body, how does our body metabolize them normally? Not only trans fats can be used as source of fat, it’s also now being used as food preservative!
So, what types of foods contain trans fats?
Spreads, such as margarine and shortening;
Fast food, such as fries, fried chicken, burgers, pies, pizzas;
Frozen food, such as frozen pies, pot pies, waffles, pizzas;
Baked goods, such as doughnuts, cookies, cakes, pastries;
Chips;
Crackers;
Popcorns;
Breakfast cereals;
Energy bars;
Candy
In a nutshell: Trans fats or hydrogenated fats are artificial. They are worse than saturated fat and our bodies don’t know what to do with them. They have a double negative effect on cholesterol as they increase LDL (bad cholesterol) and decrease HDL (good cholesterol). Remember, LDL clogs our arteries while HDL helps to clear them. Can we eliminate trans fats entirely from our diet? Probably not. Instead, our goal is to have as little trans fat in our diet as possible. Happy eating!
Continued from Part 1...
