Why Eating Right Makes Good Sense––

Home Health Consultants Entertain And Inform

By Dottie Evans

Anyone who saw Home Health Consultant Linda Parsloe stuff a crumbled jelly donut down a ladies nylon stocking and then watched it get stuck as she added sticky globs of packaged rice pudding (boasting a shelf-life of three months and containing who-knew-what-chemicals to keep it fresh) could not have failed to get the message.

While Ms Parsloe’s audience alternately giggled and cringed, she explained that the limp stocking being held vertically aloft by their fellow senior Bob Sharpe was a colon. And the highly processed food being stuffed into it at a great rate was what the average American consumed on a daily basis.

By the time the speaker had crammed in a McDonald’s hamburger, a fistful of fries, a splash of milk, several scoops of Chef Boyardee Ready-to-Eat macaroni and cheese, and a couple of crumbled Oreo cookies, the stocking was bulging out in a gross fashion, and most audience members were silently vowing never to eat those things again.

Or they were thinking with relief that it was a good idea they had switched from cheese Danish to oatmeal for breakfast several years ago.

“This demonstration is meant to illustrate that what you put into your body is what must eventually nourish all of your systems,” said Home Health Care consultant and nutritionist Dotty Pastir.

“You are not only feeding the system, you must cleanse it. And you can see that the highly processed foods are going to get lodged somewhere in the intestine and cause problems.”

Ms Pastir explained that all bodily systems, whether they be circulatory, digestive, lymphatic, or respiratory, are connected and will be affected when the diet is not healthy.

For example, a high protein diet leads to high acidity, which can contribute to heart problems, gout, arthritis, and fibromyalgia. Processed sugar also raises the body’s acid level, she said.

“Your diet should be 80 percent alkaline, which means you need to eat fruits, vegetables, nuts, and soy products as well as meat and dairy. White flour, white sugar, and highly processed foods all create an excess of waste in the colon because they do not move through quickly.

“This can cause toxins to leak into the blood at the site of a blockage, and the immune system may be comprised,” she added.

As a counterexample of what happens when the empty intestine is filled with fibrous, natural food products, Ms Parsloe asked another senior volunteer, Florence De Palma, to fill her stocking-colon with chopped vegetables, whole-grain cereal, nuts, fruit, and water. Everything bubbled through very nicely and the chunks fell out the other end.

“You can see how the roughage moves through quickly by peristalsis or the squeezing of the intestinal wall muscles, and it cleanses the colon,” Ms Pastir said.

She concluded the afternoon presentation with the following informative comments.

“Stay away from hydrogenated oils and chemical sweeteners because they are not natural foods. The cheese you find in a McDonald’s hamburger is basically plastic, and the fries are cooked in hydrogenated fat. Diet Coke is filled with phosphoric acid, which pulls the calcium right out of your body.

“If you must eat ice cream, read the label and pick a brand with as few chemical additives as possible. Remember, if food can sit on a shelf for three months, you might not want to eat it.”

The problem, Ms Pastir added, is that in today’s world “it’s easier to buy and eat processed foods than it is to cut up and prepare fresh food, or create a nice dinner from scratch.”

The Home Health Consultants are putting on a three-part lecture series on “Health, Nutrition, and Skincare” for the seniors and Wednesday’s demonstration was the second installment.

A third presentation, titled “A Day of Beauty,” will take place at 1 pm on Wednesday, April 7, at the Newtown Senior Center on 14 Riverside Road in Sandy Hook. The consultants, Dotty Pastir, Linda Parsloe, and Dale Meier, will talk about what ingredients and formulas are best for the skin.

For further information, call the Senior Center at 270-4310.