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Deborah Kesten
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VIDEO: Wellness Coach Deborah Kesten - Social Nourishment, What Is This?

Wellness Coach Deborah Kesten explains social nourishment and shares how it contributes to a healthy lifestyle.

Deborah Kesten:
Social nourishment is an element of eating and dining that Dr. Larry Scherwitz, my husband, and I, and co-researcher and I, discovered, and what we discovered is we went on what I call a nutrition journey around the world, researching not only what people ate but how they ate, with whom, how, where, over thousands of years of millennia to see what optimal eating was prior to Western nutritional science, which is only about 100 years old.

And what we discovered is a consistent pattern of eating, and that includes, fresh whole food, the what to eat for biological physical health, but also feelings that the concept was to beware of feelings before, during, and after eating, to not just jam food in your mouth, and also I call it spiritual nourishment, to eat mindfully, with gratitude. We always blessed food for thousands of years from the heart, and also to cook with love. We’ve heard that--flavor food with love--but here’s what’s key in terms of your question.

Social nourishment includes dining with others in a pleasant atmosphere, and it enhances your health and well-being because, I will give you a quick example, this is an absolutely fascinating study. A researcher named Neram did some research with some rabbits, and he fed rabbits a very high calorie, high-fat, high-cholesterol diet so the rabbits would get heart disease, they’d get clogged arteries, and when he did autopsies on rabbits, the rabbits in the middle cages had absolutely no heart disease, and he couldn’t figure out what was going on.

He retraced the steps and retraced the steps and found out that the diminutive, fairly petite research assistant was taking out the rabbits in the middle cages and holding them and feeding them while she was giving them these high-fat, high-fat foods, and he couldn’t believe that this was the reason that they did not get heart disease, and he replicated it and the exact same findings happened.

So there’s some hidden magical mystery that goes on when we’re dining in socially pleasant, socially nourishing atmosphere.

About Deborah Kesten, M.P.H.:
Deborah Kesten, M.P.H., is an international nutrition and lifestyle researcher and educator, with a specialty in preventing and reversing obesity and heart disease. She was the nutritionist on Dr. Dean Ornish’s first clinical trial for reversing heart disease through lifestyle changes, and Director of Nutrition on similar research at cardiovascular clinics in Europe. More recently, she has created the pioneering Enlightened Diet, a “whole person” optimal eating and weight loss program, the results of which were published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. With more than 200 published health articles, she is the award-winning author of The Enlightened Diet, Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul and The Healing Secrets of Food, a comprehensive, evidence-based nutrition program about the power of food to heal physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially.

Visit Deborah Kesten at her website

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