Writer and expert in nutrition and energy, this Barcelona defends in her latest book, 'Food and emotions', that there is a cause-effect between what we eat and how we feel after
Montse Bradford, writer and expert in nutrition and energy MB
Founder of several cooking schools, this Barcelona by birth, based in London from 1978 to 2006 (now residing in Barcelona), has taught at the Blanquerna University School of Nursing and Physiotherapy and taught courses throughout Europe and also in South America . Awarded the 2008 Green Prize (José Navarro Foundation) for her work in favor of responsible food and sustainable development, she has written more than ten books. The last, Food and emotions.
You defend that certain emotions are given to us by what we consume.
We have to see where the emotions come from. Do we buy them at the supermarket? Emotions have two origins. Thought, what we think generates emotions, but also what we eat. If I drink a glass of water or whiskey my emotions will be very different. And why do they generate different emotions? Because they will attack different organs. If I eat food that blocks my liver, or gallbladder, I will have emotions of anger, anger, aggression, impatience ... because each organ, depending on whether it works well or badly, generates one or the other emotions. This is fully confirmed in Chinese medicine three or four thousand years ago.
Do you think that ordinary citizens have this perception?
Lack awareness, because food is not seen from this perspective. It looks from a very primitive angle. It would be the first food level: am I hungry? Well, whatever it is, I go to a McDonald's or wherever I want. There would be two more levels: the sensory and the emotional. People are vibrating on these three levels, nothing more. And we have to go a little further, to the level of energy caused by food. Because with food we can generate health or illness. It's very important.
You explain that the human being has three bodies: physical, emotional and mental ...
Indeed, and each of them needs different things. People only identify the physicist, the one we see every day in the mirror. Instead, there is a lot of fear in paying attention to the emotional. We spend years without recycling our emotions, completely blocking this body. There is also the mental. The foods that each one needs are different. We can't give chocolate to the emotional because it doesn't work. If the boyfriend leaves us, eating chocolate we will not make him come back. The only body that has a digestive system, teeth and stomach is the physical one. The emotional body, for example, must be fed, yes, but with emotions. Each one will have his method, some will like to go dancing, others will go for a walk on the beach ... We end up feeding him, however, with physical things that do not work.
Would the welfare lie in achieving a balance between all of them?
Yes. I always make the metaphor of the three friends who are on the path of life holding hands. If all three are more or less balanced, and I say more or less because absolute harmony does not exist, they will add a team and seek together the same goal. However, if the physical body is weakened, the emotional one blocked, especially because we do not know it, and the mental body focused on controlling our life, it is very difficult to achieve any achievement. It's what happens today, lack of clarity, people are disoriented and bewildered. Starting to know the three bodies, even if little by little, would be very important.
Can a cause-effect relationship be established between what we eat and our subsequent mood?
Of course, because if I eat things that are weakening me, that are demineralizing me, I will notice emotional effects of demotivation, very cold, I will not feel like doing anything . People will be physically, emotionally and mentally with these deficiency energies. And how do I demineralize myself? Well, eating foods that have an acidic pH. The general technique of society is that we have a very blocked liver and a kidney with many deficiencies, and the kidney needs minerals. If not, negative emotions appear. The main negative emotion of the kidney is fear. Today we are afraid of everything. We are not entrepreneurs, we lack the spirit of adventure. People are very acidic, very demineralized.
Precisely, you explain in your book that there are foods that generate acidic blood (with which we build stress, disease and imbalance) and others that, on the contrary, alkalize it (with which we obtain energy, vitality and health)
Exactly. It is fascinating. We can generate our own mood. We are the creators of our life, at all levels of our being. How we choose to think is very important. We said before that one of the ways in which emotions are created is through thoughts. But of course, if we ingest whiskey, we can hardly be aware of our thoughts. The food, no doubt, is the number one to give us a little more stability, harmony, peace, and then we must look calmly at the quality of our thoughts, that also form emotions, of course.
He also defends that there are foods with yin energy (chocolate, alcohol, stimulants, sugars, artificial yeasts) that lead to hypersensitivity, while there are others, with yang energy ( meat, ham, sausages, eggs ) that make us tense and choral
That's right Alcohol, vinegars, stimulants, all this stimulates the nervous system, generating false energy. When a person, in the middle of the afternoon, feels fatigued, he seeks to drink coffee, chocolate, drink a cola in short, generate energy that he does not have. But of course, if we do this for many months we will end up creating fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue, and we are destroying the energy of the kidneys. All these foods create an energy of expansion. They inflame us and demineralize us. They tell us that we have to drink a lot of milk for the bones. But there are people with osteoporosis who, despite having had a lot of milk, and eating meat and cheese, have this problem. It is clear that it is still a topic that has been proven not to work.
And the yang ...
They are foods that tense, that accumulate. They are saturated fat. We block organs such as the liver, gallbladder, spleen, pancreas and create these emotions of much tension, aggression, anger ... in short, emotions that are called excess. We have emotions of excess, on the one hand, and deficiency on the other, such as fear, lack of self-confidence, which give us, for example, refined sugars.
According to his explanations, abusing yang products will inevitably lead us to the compulsive intake of yin foods.
Effectively. When I take a part of foods with yang energy, foods that tense us, I consciously or unconsciously want seven parts of the opposite extreme. It is what we call the energy wheel or yo-yo. It doesn't fail, when I take a part of yang, I want seven of yin. People say "what's wrong with me that I can't stop eating chocolate?" And I tell them, stop eating eggs, ham, and you'll see how you can stop eating chocolate.
Is the idea to avoid products with yin or yang energy to try to achieve well-being? Or eaten in moderation do not have to be harmful to our body?
They will always lead us to an imbalance. These saturated fat foods block the liver and also are not the example of a sustainable diet. We have 7, 000 million inhabitants on the planet and we must start eating much more from the plant kingdom. The animal kingdom is not a sustainable diet. There are 1.4 billion people who cannot eat or drink anything. And we, on the other hand, are eating ham and cheese, for example. We have to be aware of it. You have to keep in mind that to 'grow' a kilo of meat you need 1, 500 liters of water, and all this so that, later, a family ingests it in a meal. And this happens at the same time that there are people who cannot drink a drop of water. It is amazing! We are loading the planet. We cannot think only of ourselves, but also of future generations. We need a sustainable, healthy, natural and energy diet, knowing the energy of each food.
In a main meal, you say, you can not miss: whole grain cereals, legumes, an algae, a green vegetable and a small portion of seeds or nuts. Someone could say, what a bore!
Absolutely. What we do is return to natural life. Start eating what our grandparents ate. How long ago did the donut appear? It doesn't do that much either. We have to go back to the diet before, to eat legumes, vegetables, pine nuts, nuts, seeds, nuts, fruit of the season. Nor have we been eating this for so long. What needs to be done is to eat the natural foods of a lifetime, the ones we need, but in the way we want. We can make fideuás, pizzas, hamburgers, but without them being meat. We eat what we need in the way we want and in this way the emotional body is also happy.
But enjoying a good table can also generate positive emotions ...
According to what we understand by positive emotions. After the Christmas meal, the vibrations begin to rise and all the diners, during the table, think they are right. For me this is not positive. The ideal is harmony, tranquility, silence ... for me this is harmony. It is true that sensory pleasure exists and is related to emotions. But that is why you can eat a fricandó, but not of meat, but, for example, of seitan. Or a lasagna. I make a phenomenal lasagna. I also make donuts, but not with sugar, but with apple, for example.
You talked about vibrations. He defends that both food and the different bodies of the human being (physical, mental and emotional) vibrate in different ways ...
So is. The physicist vibrates so slowly that we can see and touch it. The mental, meanwhile, is the control tower. It vibrates faster than the speed of light. We mentally think that we are going to the Taj Mahal and we have come and gone. It is instantaneous. The emotional we can not see, but feel. When we are emotionally ill we feel it clearly. He doesn't need chocolate or alcohol or anything like that, what happens is that people use them to escape.
And is when he suffers?
Evidently. He complains because he has no vibrations of harmony. It is locked because we never pay attention to it. We pamper the physical body daily, shower it, feed it ... we have never cleaned the emotional one. We have never taken into account blocked emotions. We do not go to a therapist to manage them, we do not. We don't even express them, writing, for example. I speak of picking up a paper and writing how we feel, or painting, or going dancing ... the case is that they emerge in some way. We don't do it, we don't debug it, we don't clean it every day. And the mental the same. It vibrates so quickly that it out of control. It is important to manage silence, peace, to observe those thoughts that we have uncontrolled. Everyone has two minutes a day to stop, but we don't. The ideal food for the mental body is gratitude, being grateful to life.
When cooking, "we do not know how to extract the sweet taste of food, " you say. Therefore, he adds, we seek compensation in the dessert ...
Exactly. In Mediterranean cuisine there is no sweetness.
Are you questioning a reference ...
But it's true. There is no sweetness, on the plate, in Mediterranean cuisine. There is a lot of salty, a lot of oil, a lot of spicy and a lot of acid ... but not sweetness, not at all. And of course, we just ate dishes of this kitchen with so much garlic, with so much vinegar, that we look for the sweet in the custard or flan. And these desserts have a lot of sugar, and hence the children so hyperactive we have. The sweet taste is on the plate. And where do we get it from? Well, sweet vegetables: pumpkin, moniato, carrot ... all are very sweet. And if we cook them for a long time they give an incredible sweetness. Each taste tones different organs of the body.
Explain to me ...
The sweet taste balances our stomach, spleen and pancreas. They are all emotional organs, which need a lot of sweetness and relaxation. This natural sweetness is very important, I never tire of repeating it. People are very stressed and lacks a bit of sweetness. When we incorporate this into our body, we can surely relax more and have a little more harmony in our lives. If we go through the sugar route, then we see the level of hyperactivity that people have. Sugar demineralizes us, affects the nervous system, in addition to leaving our kidney, bones, etc. bad. We see how hyperactive children are. I argue that there are no naturally hyperactive children. The child acts according to the energy we give him. If we give it a tail, it will act according to the energy produced by this product. If we don't give him this kind of food, he'll be like a little angel. We have to understand this, it is very important.
You referred to cooking with time, something that many people lack today ...
I also have a very busy pace of life and I eat very well. We have time, what happens is that we do not dedicate it to the kitchen. We use it, for example, to chat. We do not value that through food we can modify the quality of our blood. It is a matter of acquiring the habit. Putting a cereal pot is a minute and a half, and you have three days. Making a grilled fish or cooking a green vegetable takes three minutes, it's very easy. Baking a pumpkin does take longer, but we don't have to be watching it all the time either. It really is very easy when you learn. What happens is that people want to change by reading a book, and for that you need an instructor. If I want to learn to drive, I cannot do it just by reading a manual, I need an instructor to teach me, because otherwise there will be shortcomings. People will come and say “this doesn't work, ” and it does work, but you have to learn it.
Reading his book, one realizes that you are not very much in favor of salads or raw fruit. Even honey is not too funny, when it is a food, according to many experts, so nutritious ...
I recommend the fruit and raw salads, but according to who. I will not advise a person who is cold. To Don Quijote, for example, I will not recommend eating much salad, because it is very thin. But to Sancho Panza yes, every day I would give him a salad. Depends on the person. Salads and all that is raw makes it very cold. A person with excess weight, who has eaten a lot of meat and who has a very blocked liver, who reports emotions of excess, anger, anger, will do great. On the other hand, a person who is decayed, with anemia, with osteoporosis, because I do not recommend them. The energy kitchen gives me knowledge and gives me freedom to choose. I am not in favor of diets, of prohibiting. I explain the effects that food produces, after everyone chooses.
And with respect to honey ...
When I take a spoonful of honey, at thirty seconds I am very hot. This is telling me that this is a food that does not pass through the digestive system, but goes directly to the bloodstream and gives me instant hyperactivity. The ideal day to drink honey? The day we want to run a marathon, no problem. We take some honey and win the race (laughs). But for day to day no, because it will give us a lot of hyperactivity. If we drink a lot, it demineralizes us, because everything that energizes the moment acidifies the blood. And when I have it acidic, the pH changes and the body looks for minerals from anywhere. That's why I don't recommend drinking honey every day, at all.
What would you say to that person who is not convinced of the food method you propose?
Try it, follow it for six months. The people who try it win in quality of life. It gains in concentration, mental clarity, in the desire to do things, to lose weight or gain it, if necessary ... We cannot say something if it is not tested, if it is not lived. I give freedom in my classes. I explain what energy each food provides, and then people decide.
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source: La Vanguardia newspaper
