Good nutrition is essential to optimal mental and physical health and performance.  Whether you follow a meat-centered, vegetarian, vegan, macrobiotic, or raw food diet, there is one common denominator for success: that the foods are of high quality and unadulterated.

Maria follows and prescribes a whole food diet.  The principle is simple: food should be minimally processed. Processing includes any form of cooking, chopping, canning, grinding, or preserving, or alteration of any kind.

Every food has it’s own nutritional balance and integrity.  The moment a vegetable is picked from the garden, it begins to lose nutrition.  Of  course, some amounts of processing are required for meal-preparation.  The majority of food processing should be done in the home.  As one of Maria’s most successful clients used to say, “If I don’t make it myself, I don’t eat it.”

In translation, if the food item was purchased wrapped in plastic or cardboard packaging, combined with ingredients you cannot identify or pronounce, or is generally heavily marketed by a food company, it should be avoided and reserved for special occasions.

“Food has come a long way in the past fifty years.  Industrial agricultural production and policy, combined with the advent of food additives and stabilizers, has put a new face on food, the majority of which is nutritionally inferior and completely out of balance for human requirements.  If your grandparents didn’t eat it, chances are, you shouldn’t either.”

For more information on the whole food diet, see Explaining The Whole Food Diet.