John Arts Abundant Living www.johnarts.co.nz

You can choose any analogy you like: First attend to the basics; make sure the foundations are solid; do the important things first.

However you want to express it, when it comes to health, there are some things we absolutely must do. If we take shortcuts we will pay the price which can be everything from the development of preventable disease to a shorter lifespan or maybe just not being able to do the things we want to do.

When creating a nutritional programme for someone I need first attend to the essentials. For example if someone has an inflammatory health problem, say osteoarthritis in their knees, we need to ensure that their diet is as anti-inflammatory as possible. This means reducing inflammatory foods such as some polyunsaturated oils and increasing those that have the ability to switch off inflammation when it is not needed. If the basics are not attended to first, the problem is effectively ‘window-dressed' or masked

The essentials of health are good food, clean water and exercise. While your body can tolerate the occasional carbonated cola, it needs fresh clean water for optimum hydration. Anything else is second best.

Your body needs to have sufficient protein, carbohydrates and fats for your lifestyle. Additionally you need the full range of vitamins and the full spectrum of major and trace minerals to power the enzymes which help your cells do the thousands of things they need to do.

I apply exactly the same principles to health supplements. I see little point in supplementing with a whole lot of non- essential things while ignoring the basics. I speak to hundreds of people who are taking any number of supplements, yet they have not attended to the basics first.

For most people, most of the time, the place to start with supplements is a really good multi-style product. A good product should have at least 25 preferably chelated minerals, be a complete multi-vitamin and ideally cover the major groups of antioxidants.

To this I would usually add a good, stable Omega 3 Fish oil supplement. Once this has been done, the basics for recovering or retaining our precious health have been covered.

John Arts is the founder of Abundant Health. For product information visit www.abundant.co.nz If you have questions or would like a free health plan you can contact John at john@johnarts.co.nz or phone 07 578
9051 or 0800 423 559. You can join his newsletter at www.johnarts.co.nz Read more from John at www.sunlive.co.nz