Essential Nutrients for Seniors

Video Transcript

"OK we're talking about weight management here. We're talking about the importance of burning calories -- the fact that we have to burn more than we consume. The next important thing is dieting and hydration. The body needs certain essential nutrients to do what it does. It's our job to give it what it needs. We, throughout the course of our day, make demands on the body. We put it through all kinds of rigors, and it needs what it needs, so we have a problem. The problem is the food we eat; the source of this food is depleted. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. In order to get the nutritional value that we used to get from a pound of spinach back in the 1950s, we have to consume 70 pounds. Can you visualize 70 pounds of spinach? That's a lot of spinach to eat! But to get the same nutritional value we used to get from one pound, we now have to consume 70 pounds. Why is that? That's because the source has been depleted because man evolved from being gatherers to farming the land. Farming the same land over and over, it erodes the soil. The nutrients are just not there. Bottom line, the nutrients are not in the foods that we're consuming, and the body is in a state of starvation. What happens is what we call cravings. The body pushes you because it needs something that it's not getting. For example, myself I remember getting up in the middle of the night going to the refrigerator. I'm driven. It's the cravings. Have you ever felt that you had a taste for something, but you can't figure out what it is? So you try something...it's not that; you try something else...it's not that. It's your body trying to tell you that this is what I need and you're not giving it to me."