If you want to be healthy then you need a healthy gut and a healthy gut needs good quality natural foods.
In order to fully understand the importance of eating the right food you need to have a basic understanding of how you digest your food.
So here goes: When you see or smell food you brain starts to prepare your body to receive it.
It does this by producing saliva for the mouth and digestive juices for the stomach.
The saliva in your mouth is distributed throughout the food by that action of chewing.
Once the food is softened it is received by the stomach where it is further processed into a form of sludge.
This sludge is passed into the intestines where all the absorption work is done.
The intestines are like a long tube which is lined with wrinkles.
These wrinkles allow the nutrients to pass from the intestines into the blood stream.
Once in the blood the nutrients can be taken to the relevant places.
The other thing to note about the intestines is that different parts of the intestines are responsible for absorbing different types of nutrients, so the food needs to move through the intestines efficiently to make sure that as much as possible of the goodness you have eaten is used by the body.
There are two main advantages to eating natural foods.
The first is the increased levels of nutrients and the second is the bulk in the food.
The texture in your food is very important.
Let us take the example of eating a fresh apple, verses eating an apple purée.
Firstly, you see an apple you will probably be able to smell it as well hence your brain can process what it is, how you eat it and vaguely what to expect by way of processing it.
With the fruit purée there is no smell and this slows down the brains response, and hence the brain does not prepare the body.
The apple is chewed in the mouth and this helps to produce the necessary digestive juices.
The fruit purée does not need to be chewed and therefore it arrives unannounced in the stomach.
At this point the stomach has to produce digestive juices and it may get the wrong amount; too little will lead to indigestion pain and too much will lead to heartburn.
The food next enters the intestines.
The apple has a degree of bulk fibrous carbohydrates, which the intestinal muscles force through the intestines during the process of absorption.
The purée on the other hand has minimal bulk.
This limited bulk means that there is less for the muscles to work on and the result is that either the purée sticks to the intestines and is not moved or it waits until more food arrives to force it through the intestinal track.
This example is a very simple explanation of how taking a perfectly natural food and by changing its consistency you are not necessarily removing any nutrients, but you are potentially affecting and damaging the efficiency of your digestion.
The apple is a natural food, but the apple purée is a healthy but not natural food!