Sometimes I wonder how most locally-bred goats on the street look so robust with their furs neatly laid, and always glowing.
I wondered whatever they eat to deserve such glow! A stressfree hair sheen at that!
Well I didn’t have to search too far. Oh yes, it was the obvious – Greens and food wastes!
No doubt, goats eat green grass and food wastes.
These food wastes comprises mostly the outer portion of grains, tubers and even fruits.
I remember during my Masters program, when one of my lecturers declared that during most processing procedures of foods, the core nutrients oftentimes get discarded as wastes.
Quite surprising? I’ll tell you how…
Let’s use the popular African corn meal majorly called pap as our case study.
Did you know that the portion we sieve out while making ‘pap’ is one of the major skin and health care routine we give the goats, same waste item(bran and germ) that help them attain the fresh look whilst leaving only the starch (endosperm) for us to consume?
Well, if you don’t know, now you know. And that’s only one out of many instances.
Though it was quite unbelievable back then, but from my research experience, I discovered it’s very true.
No don’t go yet…there’s more!
Each time you eat highly processed foods, you exclude from your diet not only the essential nutrients but hundreds of other undiscovered phytonutrients that are crucial for normal human function. When the nutrient-rich outer cover is removed from whole grains during processing, the most nutritious part of the food is lost. The outer portion contains trace minerals, vitamins, phytoestrogens, lignans, phytic acid, indoles, phenolic compounds, and other phytochemicals.
True whole grain foods, which are associated with longer life, are vastly different from the processed foods that make up the bulk of calories in our food.