Mountain Views News          Saturday, May 2, 2015

12

HEALTHY LIFESTYLES

Mountain Views-News Saturday, May 2, 2015 

 
THE JOY OF YOGA


OPENING UP


WHERE HAS ALL THE TASTE GONE?

Yoga has a way of 
healing parts that 
we didn’t know 
needed the healing. 
Also, it reveals and 
uncovers great, 
amazing parts of us we didn’t know we had. 
Think of your mat as a processing station. There’s 
acknowledgement, connection, discovery and 
release. 

 When I say release, I could actually use the 
word relinquish. As painstaking as it is, negative 
attitudes and misperceptions have to be discarded. 
Instead, gathering awareness and making our 
Divine connection becomes the healer as well as 
our revealer. It’s a gradual, dynamic process that 
can be enhanced by our focus/awareness or held 
back by resistance. 

 There are great questions to ask to determine if 
your current practice (or lack thereof!) is assisting 
you personally and spiritually. Is your life going 
well? What is your level of enthusiasm? How are 
your relationships? What about your creativity? 

 One of the best markers of happiness, joy and 
freedom is that access to our creative being. When 
we have that spark and freshness, life is good and 
healthy! It’s in those times when we are closed, 
protected and unteachable, life is not so good. Try 
using your yoga practice as a way of opening up 
and learning, not just for the wonderful physical 
effects. You may just discover an idea that you’ve 
been meaning to express for a long time. 

Love and Light,

Keely Totten

I was traveling last 
week and read an 
article in the Wall 
Street Journal about 
how our foods are 
getting blander. The 
author of the article, 
Mark Schatzker, also 
the author of the 
book, The Dorito 
Effect, says that diets 
come and go and 
ultimately don’t work 
because we are not addressing the real issue which is 
the divide between flavor—the tastes we crave—and 
the underlying nutrition. 

 Schatzker states, that since the late 1940s, we 
have been slowly leeching flavor out of the food we 
grow. Ask your grandparents or parents depending 
on your age, if strawberries or tomatoes were tastier 
and sweeter when they were kids as compared to 
now? It is animal nature that we crave certain food 
so that we will get the nutrition that we need to grow 
and repair our bodies. 

 So why are our foods blander? It has been shown 
that spinach in 1950 had way more iron in it than 
it does now. The same has been seen in all the 
nutrients found in tomatoes. The problem is we are 
trying to produce more crops on a given acre of land 
than nature intended. In doing so, we are taking raw 
materials out of the soil before they can be replaced 
by nature. We have not been satisfied with the size 
of the crops so we alter them so they grow larger. 
To top it off we have created disease resistant crops. 
What we are really saying is that nature got it wrong. 
As crops become more productive, affordable and 
disease resistant they lose their nutrition and in turn 
their taste. 

 To compound matters, we have created processed 
foods like salad dressings, ketchup, bottled sauce 
and the like to drown our bland food in. Many of 
the ingredients that make these foods taste good 
to us are created in a lab artificially. Even worse 
we take the flavors we crave and sprinkle them on 
so called foods that have no nutrition in them at 
all, like snack chips (potato, corn….) and sodas. 
Schatzker points out that today’s junk food aisle is 
over flowing with the flavors that are disappearing 
like tomato, strawberry, blueberry, and cherry to 
name a few. 

 What can we do? Spend your food dollars on 
good organic food. If possible, grow your own 
crops, especially heirloom crops as each and every 
year there are many of these crop varieties that just 
disappear. I have found that my tastes have changed. 
I removed most of these artificially processed foods 
and my taste has improved and is more sensitive. 
So, try eating good quality foods with less salt, sugar 
and store bought sauces and in a few weeks, you will 
begin to need less of all that extra artificial flavor. 
Over time, avoiding the artificial foods will allow 
your tastes to adapt to real foods again. 

Dr. Tina is a traditional 
naturopath and nutritionist 
at Vibrant Living 
Wellness Center


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