By Maria Manazza
This article shares Maria Manazza’s personal experience and perspective through Natural Hygiene. It is not medical advice.
Hey everyone, here is the first half of September’s Q&A collected from the group posts and threads in case anyone missed them. I hope everyone is doing well and keeping up with their hydration! I’m thinking that it’s important now more than ever to build these healthy habits because coming next are the holidays, such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, etc., where most people tend to eat more than they normally do from the foods that cause disease issues because unhealthy food is everywhere! Getting in the health groove now will help us to prepare for the times ahead.
Yes, I hear you. For the past 15 years, I’ve been moving towards self-sufficiency. I even lived off-grid for a while without electricity or water unless my sophisticated generator was on so I could run water or turn on my Vitamix.
I also ran a farm right before I went plant-based because I was trying to heal with raw milk, eggs and farm organic meats. That was a wake-up call in itself because there I realized how much insanity and work it is to feed animals, kill animals, and process and preserve their products. Farms always require outside inputs. They are so much work. You’re chained to your farm and can’t leave because everything depends on you being there.
I live in a cold climate. Soon my trees will be supplying my fruit needs for a quarter of the year, and I’m still working on growing greens yearly. I freeze local fruit for winter and have dehydrated fruit for emergencies, but I still depend. No matter what diet I choose to eat, I will always depend on some outside source, I’ve realized, unless I move to an ideal location.
I will die (or shorten my life by depleting my nerve energy) if I don’t stack wood and burn it for six months every year. I am dependent on heat to mimic a tropical environment each winter. But one thing I know for certain: the simpler the diet, the easier to sustain. This diet is much easier to sustain if all I have to do is freeze my fruit and grow greens indoors/outdoors than any other diet. Growing grains is extremely time-consuming and requires so much energy. If we didn’t have big machines shucking grains and storing them properly, they are almost impossible to get! There is no other diet more simple and easy to sustain than our natural human diet, in my opinion.
I think it depends on what is being used in the growing medium for nutrients, first off. If I was growing hydroponics at home, I would definitely trust it more than commercial operations. Nothing replaces sunlight energy and food grown properly in healthy soil, as this is our optimal food source, the original design which man cannot improve upon.
I’m not against hydroponics, but if given a choice, I will always opt for the natural sunlight-grown foods! I’ll be growing greens this year under artificial lighting indoors because I’m tired of driving at least half an hour to a grocery store to buy greens imported from California.
Detox is not something that we do to our body. It’s something that the body does naturally when correct conditions are present. Health results from healthy living.
It is my understanding that a little fat is important to meet the body’s overall needs, and too much fat long-term can cause certain issues, such as malabsorption or using excess energy for digestion, etc. So the general rule is to keep our fat intake to around 8–10% of our overall daily intake, which we can easily track on the Cronometer app. It generally looks like half an avocado with our evening greens or a handful of nuts or seeds instead. I usually do one or the other, and I try not to do both in the same evening. What was working well for me was to have fats every second day.
The red veins often indicate inflammation when located in the whites of the eyes.
