Nourishment

Nourishing foods are delicious and satisfying. Your body wants to be nourished and to thrive. If you are not giving it what it needs, cravings and hunger become nearly constant companions. Worse still, junk food and other commercial foods have hooks that make them addictive. The addictiveness comes in a one-two punch:

1. addictive foods fail to provide enough of the needed nutrients, so your body is always asking for something more (all those missing nutrients), and
2. addictive foods have over-stimulating flavors that promise nutrition, but that keep your system excited and never satisfied.
   

   Chicken Coconut Cilantro Soup

Nourishing Food is More than just Vegetables

Low-fat foods and vegetarian diets have a similar problem. They typically don’t provide a full range of nutrients, such as fat-soluble vitamins and even the fats themselves, and they lack many other compounds that help the body. One good example of this is the collagen we need for our joints, bones, and skin. Collagen loss may explain why I lost 1½ inches in height when I was a vegetarian. X-rays from the mid-1990s revealed that my vegetarian-fed spinal disks had frayed-looking edges and some compaction. Fatigue and apparent intolerance to vegetarian staples like soy beans finally drove me to add meats and eggs back into my diet in 1998.  Within 5 years, I regained over an inch in height. More recent images of my spine show plumper disks with clear smooth edges.

Nourishment from Bone Broth

Perhaps the biggest reason for this turn-around in my degenerating spine was the liberal addition of home-made, long-cooked, gelatinous bone broth and meats to my diet in 1999. Because bone broth is made with the same materials as my own spine, it supplies the needed elements in the right proportions. I firmly believe on its nutritional value, so I was glad to see that broth is getting the attention of health magazines and even the New York Times Food Section (“Bones, Broth, Bliss“).

“Bliss” is the last word in the title of the Times article about broth. Broth brings flavor and satisfaction, a form of bliss. Flavor and satisfaction are natural features of a nourishing diet. Stocks made from meat and bones are a classic chef secret that make for wonderful tasting foods. Broth also appears in every traditional culture. Academic nutrition experts seem to overlook the ubiquitous place of broth in the diets they study when they make pronouncements about nutritional advantages of any given dietary tradition, as in China or the Mediterranean, for instance.

Read more about the health benefits of broth.
Get a quick overview of making bone broth, or meat stocks.
How to make chicken bone broth.
How to make seafood broth.