With farmers’ markets and your own garden, you can have foods that are ripened on the vine or in the field. The importance of this is the level of phytonutrients that you get.
When buying fruits and veggies in the supermarket or health food store, the items have been collected green and sent to a warehouse for distribution at a later time. It is always old and less than at optimum for nutrition and health.
When gathering from the garden, you have the ability to wait until all are truly ready. You influence the soil, the soil treatments, nutrients, varieties of plants and when you harvest. It is easy to eat the rainbow because you can grow the rainbow right there in the garden.
These are still not ready but we are waiting for them.
When buying at the local farmers’ markets you have the opportunity to buy fresh, local and harvested today. I am more interested in the energy of the grower, whether they use commercial pesticides and whether they pick fresh for that market than I am interested in an organic label.
Ever since the FDA and US government got into defining organic the quality of organic foods in the united states has seriously degraded. If buying at supermarkets or health food stores it is better than nothing, but it is largely meaningless today. This is true particularly if buying prepackaged foods. I have a rule that if the ingredients list more than 5 items I don’t buy it.
Of particular interest is that freshly picked, ripe produce is high in Salvestrols. Salvestrols are an interesting category of phytonutrients that specifically attack the cell lining of cancer and cancer stem cells, that contain CYP1B1 which makes cancer cells resistant to treatment.
Along with eating the rainbow (particularly purple foods), foods high in salvestrols improve baseline health and make a person more resilient to illness.
