We’ve all heard how certain foods can have specific positive effects on the human body.
I wouldn’t begin to dispute that, but I feel like there’s more to the story than what we’re often told, and there are things we can do to assist foods in bestowing their benefits upon us.
To illustrate, allow me to use part of a list of foods and their favorable bodily influences compiled by an online healthy living source and add what I believe can make them especially effective.
• Pineapple burns fat and tones the stomach.
Especially if you jog two miles three times a week, do 50 sit-ups every day and don’t sit on the couch almost every night and down a bag of potato chips, four jumbo chocolate chip cookies and two moon pies.
• Lemons alkalize and cleans your liver.
Especially if you’re not consuming them along with a fifth of Wild Turkey.
• Limes remove toxins from the body.
Especially if you don’t consume large quantities of processed materials and substances (sometimes called foods) laden with sugar and chemicals that put toxins into your body in the first place.
• Apples help prevent depression and reduce anxiety.
Especially if you eat them just after you’ve won the lottery and don’t eat them right after losing your job or spouse.
• Cabbage helps reduce body fat. See pineapple.
• Asian pears help remove radioactive toxins from your body.
Especially when they’re not purchased from a store near Chernobyl, Russia.
• Cherries strengthen the heart and circulatory system.
Especially when you don’t smoke two packs of cigarettes every day.
• Blueberries balance blood sugar preventing hypoglycemia.
See pineapple and cabbage.
• Bananas have powerful antiviral properties.
Especially if you wash your hands before eating them if you just ran your hand over a stairway handrail at your local middle school.
• Oranges help sinus and respiratory issues. See cherries.
• Melon hydrates the skin and nails.
Especially if you eat it along with drinking several glasses of water every day instead of chugging mass quantities of soda.
There you have it. Put into practice, these suggestions could well help the listed foods do a better job of working their various healthy wonders in our bodies.
Sure, maybe the suggestions are foolish and I’m just a misguided dreamer for even thinking in such a way. But I prefer to think it’s kind of like where food science meets logic and reality.
Just sayin’.
Doug Davison is a writer, photographer and newsroom assistant for the Houston Herald. His columns are posted online at www.houstonherald.com. Email: ddavison@houstonherald.com.