A Re-Evolution in Nutrition & Optimal Health

How do we move into a new future of health & vitality, beyond being simply disease free, but also free from the often overlooked subtle states of chronic poor health that plague today’s world? Roots to Sky believes that we must break with the modern approach of hairsplitting our foods into counting isolated components and must instead zoom out to see the whole picture, and retrace our steps back to learn how we got here in the first place. What follows is both a spiral timeline and a step-by-step guide that crystallizes the nutrition strategy of Roots to Sky…

1. First, many of the chronic health concerns (diabetes, heart disease, cancers etc.) we face today are often due to lack of vital whole foods coupled with an unbalanced lifestyle. To correct this, we must begin by completely nourishing ourselves – returning to a whole food diet.

• We are being starved on too much: refined, nutrient void, polluted foods. Without replenishing ourselves, we live our stressful lifestyles running on empty. Our cars can’t do it, how can we?
• Correcting this only takes us back a few hundred years at most – many of the chronic diseases we face today weren’t as rampant, but obviously poor health was still prevalent.

2. So we must look at our individual body-mind ecosystem: eat whole foods, as much as you can, but the right ones for you.

• Enter Traditional Wholistic Medicines. These start from the perspective that we are all unique beings with unique needs. From this perspective, we all have an innate set of ‘imbalances’ we tend to slip into – our ‘constitutional tendencies’. To illustrate, let’s say that some of us lean more towards ‘North’, others ‘East’, while others ‘South-West’ in our physical-behavioural tendencies. To maintain centredness & presence we must balance our lifestyle and foods using the opposite directions – to bring North-leaning into centre, we must add South, warmth to cold – to Yang we add Yin.
• We do not aim to be superior or transcend these innate imbalances in favour of a “superhuman” state, as this is often simply a reflection of the innate imbalance itself. These ‘imbalances’ (for lack of a better word) are our gifts, our sources of wisdom, our teachers, and by ignoring them we miss out on our purpose & lessons of being here.
• This takes us back a few thousand years, now we have the origins of traditional Chinese ‘Yangsheng’ (Nourishing Life) and Indian ‘Ayurvedic’ (Science of Life) teachings. Yet even then chronic disease was prevalent else we wouldn’t have these traditions…

3. And so to bring health into a new level we now must incorporate the right medicinal superfoods and herbal medicines of our modern global world; utilizing the strengths of our common human traditions, all appropriate for the constitution of the individual.

• The most nutrient dense foods with the least amount of calories, correctly applied to your constitution will slow metabolism, and you will thrive in optimum weight & health (more on this, in an upcoming article).
• From Roots to Sky’s clinical experience, often unguided supplementation and extreme diets can cause more harm than good. We must meet your body where it is, now, and then direct it to our goals and visions of ultimate health. Trends of superfoodism & raw diets are all geared towards maximum health, but are these one-size-fits all diets the right ones for you? In order to reach a desired destination we must first tune up the vehicle we already have – feeding its unique needs, bringing it into whole balance, before pushing it to its potential.
• This is new to the world, one of the few advantages of globalization. It is our ethical responsibility that the superfoods & herbs we consume be sustainably sourced and the environments & cultures where they come from preserved and protected. We must honour the traditional methods and wisdom of how & when to incorporate, else we are at risk for perpetuating colonialism and cultural appropriation.

4. We must then fuse this backbone of traditional wisdom, medicines & foods, with the right doses of nutriceuticals (supplementation) of today’s advanced modern science based nutrition, to stabilize any remaining missing gaps in our diets.

• Again, we must seek to understand the powerful energetic nature of these molecules (based on the observations from experienced Traditional Medicine elders) and seek to find their balance and harmony within our bodies.
• This effectively is the future of super-health. This is East meets West, Traditional meets Modern.

5. Most importantly & above all else, we must recognize that the mind & body are one – if an individual’s psychology remains unexplored or suppressed, any traumas will be stored in the physical body (which can be also seen as the literal ‘unconscious’) until they can be brought to the surface of the conscious mind to be healed.

• Even with the highest quality diet we cannot escape this work, for maximum wholistic health to be achieved.
• If we tend to fall back into habitual eating patterns, addictions, or other pre-programmed behaviour in general, exploring this terrain is critical for a solid foundation of vitality.

Thus, To Maintain Health & Longevity:

Foundation: Our Daily Diet, Unique to our ‘Constitutions’ & current weathers of imbalance.

Insurance Policy: High-quality Multivitamin, Minerals & Nutrients

Vitality: Superfoods & ‘Superior’ Herbs*

(*Shen Cong Ben Cao, the classic ancient Chinese text that first listed herbs in hierarchies)

A Revolution in Nutrition & Optimal Health by Matt Walton R.TCMP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.