Good eating, and thus good health, is not generally a question of lack of knowledge, says naturopath Jeremy Hill. It's more a case of willpower!

I really love healthy eating and I tend to find it to be an extremely easy thing to do. In fact, over the years I've come to understand what is necessary to meet the requirements for a healthy meal with such clarity I often find myself taking it for granted that everyone else knows the basics of good nutrition, too. And that they, like me, strive with such knowledge, for good health every time they undertake to consider, prepare, or even order a meal. Unfortunately, my optimistic approach is not always validated! Indeed, there's often work to be done on the nutritional basics of many more people's diets than I expect. And so, when I sit at my work desk, honoured with the request of helping someone find better health, I need to regularly give myself a bit of a nudge to say, “Don’t forget to cover the basics”.

More often than not, I find my patients actually do have a fair to middling idea of what they should be eating, day after day, to optimally fuel their bodies, although most still tend to fall well short of eating an ideal diet (due more to a lack of willpower than of knowledge). But every now and then, I get some good reality checks when I find myself dealing with a teenager who asks if broccoli is “the green one”; or when a grown up who should know better admits to not eating veggies “because I don’t like the taste of them”; or when I’m standing at a shopping centre checkout and the cashier holds up a beetroot and, with a confused look, asks me, “What’s this?” And you’d be amazed at how many people proudly (yet erroneously) list mushrooms as one of their major sources of protein.

Laying blame is not generally considered to be a constructive move in problem solving but, in this case, I feel it’s necessary and so I’ll call it as I see it. I firmly believe most of the responsibility for poor understanding of important dietary knowledge lies at the feet of parents or legal guardians. Unfortunately, they often miss the perfect opportunity to teach by example when they simply choose not to eat well themselves.

At twenty one months of age, my little girl is already well versed in the contents of her diet and will happily give you an accurate running commentary on the “mmmm, yuuuummmy” (her words, not mine - although I do concur) foods on her dinner plate, happily naming and then devouring each item. And they include such traditional childhood non-favourite classics as broccoli, cauliflower, beans, onion, pumpkin, cabbage and sweet potato. She even loves whole roast garlic cloves. For sweet treats she asks for dynamic antioxidant-rich foods such as blueberries and raspberries, with a serve of yoghurt - natural, not sweetened, of course. And instead of asking for sweet-laden drinks such as cordial, fruit juice, choc milk or cool drink, she requests water or “some green tea please daddy”, raising her cup with an enthusiastic “cheers”.

These are not instinctive requests, and nor are they forced behaviour created by fanatical naturopathic parents. They are simply the result of her living in an environment where healthy eating is the norm. If soft drink and takeaway junk food was served with dinner, followed by a big plateful each of ice cream out of our freezer every night after the meal, you can bet that’s what she’d be asking for instead of blueberries (blueberries are yummy, but they’re no match for ice cream). It’s just a case of “monkey see, monkey do”, and our little monkey simply “does healthy”.

And so, if you’re already well into your life’s culinary journey and now realise that you may have inadvertently deviated down the pothole - ridden road of dietary shortcuts, what you can do first up as you attempt to get back on the right track is to begin by swapping a few bad habits for good ones. Habit replacement is often a big part of positively changing one's lifestyle. Some examples that it’s actually working for you include taking a walk instead of having a smoke, eating a carrot or celery stick instead of a chocolate bar, reading a book instead of watching TV, having a green tea instead of a coffee, replacing full strength beer with a mid strength beer. See how easy it is?

Consider what usually happens in these situations when we simply cease the offending habit-in-question without replacing it with something else. We’re left with a void, and the most frequent result of such extreme deprivation is to eventually fill that void with the initial bad habit at the exact same level as it previously existed. We do what we know, so new realities need to be created, new lessons need to be learned - and we all have the ability to learn new patterns, no matter where we are in life.

As well as openly examining our learned behaviours, we need to realise that, often, poor dietary choices are based simply on our modern want for convenience. It’s easy and requires little thought to climb out of bed at the last minute, run through the shower and grab a muesli bar as we run out the front door. Or pick up a coffee and a muffin as we fly past the local café or, worse still, skip breakfast completely.
On the other hand, it takes a little time to prepare a healthy breakfast and you need to have been organised enough to have bought the ingredients previously. But the benefits are huge and our energy, health and productivity increase accordingly with better breakfast nutrition. The same applies to our children, many of whom seem to be getting sent to school with a poorly balanced breakfast in their tummy and an inadequate lunch in their lunch box. I see many a Mum start to squirm uncomfortably in her chair when I ask junior about what food they get sent to school with and the truth comes spilling out in waves of convenience-laden honesty.

Being taught good healthy eating habits early in life can set up imprinted patterns that may well last a lifetime, and give us a huge advantage toward optimising our potential for achieving and maintaining health, both now and the future. With chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, stroke and heart disease tending to sneak up on us - being either encouraged or discouraged by our choice of foods - I guess we are not just what we eat, we are what we learned to eat.

So why are the quicker and more processed foods so often bad for us? In a nutshell, they’re generally higher in calories and they contain more sugar, more trans fatty acids, more additives and less nutrition than a similar meal you could easily have made for yourself from some fresh ingredients at home.

All of these points are important. But from a brain development and learning perspective, it’s the deficiencies that can count a lot at a very young age indeed. Deficiencies in certain nutrients early in life are known to affect the growing brain, with iodine, iron and the Omega 3 essential fatty acid Docosahexaenoic Acid (DHA), taking a high priority, especially during gestation and early childhood. Inadequate intake of other nutrients such as magnesium and various B vitamins is closely linked to learning, memory and focus problems in both children and adults.

With various nutritional deficiencies scattered, in high incidence, throughout the general population, the potential for less than optimal brain development begins for many people well before they’re even conceived, continuing through pregnancy, their childhood and then throughout life. Obviously, there’s the potential for these same learned patterns to be repeated in the next generation for the same reasons. And so the cycle continues.

These days, as well as a strong tendency to streamline our diets to suit our tastebuds, timeframe and attention spans, our lives are also filled with daily exposure to many thousands of man-made chemicals. Many of these have proved to be very bad for our health, and the potential for chemical pollutants to act as a source of learning difficulties in the developing brains of our children today is very real. Chemicals which persist in the environment such as Dioxins and Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) have the potential to dramatically and permanently affect our kids’ neurological development by suppressing the ability of their developmentally stimulating thyroid hormones to bind to their cellular receptors. And then there is also justified concern about insidious toxic heavy metals, such as lead and mercury, both of which are well recognised as posing a significant threat to neurological development in children.

More recently, much focus has been placed upon the associated learning and behavioural disorders seen in children exposed to the less researched, but far more commonly occurring, indoor pollution. The term ‘sick building syndrome’ has been coined to cover the wide range of side effects observed in sufferers. This appears to be a spin off of modern living, with sources of chemicals including the out-gassings of fumes from various floorings and furniture, as well as numerous commonly used indoor pesticides, cleaning products and air fresheners.

For the sake of our own health and that of our children and future generations, we all need to be aware of the examples we set. Regardless of our intentions, it’s our actions that form the lessons we teach, sending a clear message to our own body and to the minds of others when we simply commit to using fewer chemicals and to eating better foods. Throw in lots of love and pass on a very rich legacy indeed!