One of the most frequent questions I get is whether I take nutritional supplements. I’ve never needed them because I believe that when we eat a sufficient and complete diet, we get all the vitamins, minerals, and everything our bodies need from food.

The human body is actually a wonderfully designed, perfectly functioning system. The heart never forgets to beat, the kidneys never forget to cleanse the blood, and the lungs never forget to breathe. When we first come into the world, this system’s factory settings are all working perfectly, and this depends on only one condition: nourishing the body with the right foods. Natural foods provide everything we need, but in modern life, we expose our bodies to many things our DNA doesn’t recognize. The increase in diseases over the last 50 years is the biggest indicator of this.

With the development of industry, refined, processed products, packaged foods, and many foods whose contents we can’t understand when we read the labels have entered our lives. As the consumption of these foods increased, we moved away from the natural vegetables, fruits, vegetable oils, legumes, whole grains, and nuts that we truly need. We started consuming more sugar, animal products, processed meats, and refined grains, disrupting our bodies’ balance. “Light” biscuits became healthy, while “olive oil” became harmful.

The increase in animal farms and the fact that livestock farming has become an economy in itself has also greatly impacted things. While even the meat of naturally fed animals is harmful in excess, we started consuming excessive amounts of meat from animals raised without oxygen and fed with factory-processed feed. Lobbies proclaiming “animal protein is a basic necessity” sprang up everywhere. By consuming more animal products than needed and not eating the right vegetables to balance it, we accumulated unsaturated fats in our bodies. This, in turn, brought upon humanity a host of diseases like cancer, heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes.

When our body’s balance is disrupted, medications and nutritional supplements begin to be produced to correct it. Then we start consuming them in large quantities. We develop many illnesses and seek remedies in medications and supplements that eliminate the symptoms, not the diseases themselves. However, the root cause of these illnesses is the flawed system we follow. Instead of correcting the source of the illness, we are left with only chemical medications. From this perspective, the picture is very clear. We are struggling in a vicious cycle. If we returned to our factory settings and nourished ourselves with the foods nature offers, many of the diseases of our time would disappear, and we wouldn’t need handfuls of nutritional supplements or medications.

Healing is in nature, we just need to know how to use it. We just need to remove packaged products that disrupt our balance from our lives. Actually, the matter becomes very simple when we eat with this logic: “Don’t eat anything your grandmother’s mother didn’t know.”

Of course, there’s also the aspect of air pollution, magnetic fields, radiation, and the abundance of base stations around us, but I’ll address that in another article. Even a simple first step, such as making our bodies happy with the right foods, will make a huge difference.

I wish everyone healthy, happy, and sugar-free days.

Note: This article was published on my column at www.hthayat.com on February 17, 2017.