Nutrition & Healthy Eating Collaboration Takeaways

The Global Wellness Collaborations bring industry leaders together in meaningful dialogue to share ideas and best practices for navigating the COVID-19 crisis around a specific industry segment.

Topic: Nutrition & Healthy Eating
Date of Discussion:  April 9, 2020
Countries/Regions Represented: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Korea, Latvia, Mexico, The Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, UAE, UK and US

• We are at the point in the field of wellness, fitness, nutrition and health that suddenly all of the things that we’ve been espousing for decades have come into focus. The plain fact of the matter is, healthier people are less affected by the Coronavirus, which has always been the case with illness.

• I am finding it quite difficult to shop once a week. This process has been challenging, you know, emotionally and physically on all of us. Now more than ever, I’m focusing on supplements.

• I am focusing more than ever on turmeric and also increasing my dosage of vitamin C and adding probiotics. It seems like all of these things will strengthen my immune system.

• Our bodies are in fight and flight mode most of the time. To prioritize digestion, I cook with cumin, coriander and fennel and use that combination with equal parts and make it into a tea.

• I found myself resorting back to foods that I loved to eat when I was a child. It reminds me of a distant, lovely past. So, happiness for me, is even sometimes eating some crappy food like chocolate.

• A wellness message needs to be something that people can relate to and don’t feel like it’s above where they are or is insensitive.

• We’ve been doing a lot of forward planning and cooking together with a few spirited arguments in my house, which is fun.

• Food art is big in Ireland. Picking colorful food, like peppers, and cutting them into different shapes and patterns can really be a joyful time with children.

• Intermittent fasting works for a lot of people who are making this into a practice. I believe it works best for people who have very long hours and who do not get time to really exercise. Since they have some gaps in hours, they allow their body to burn all the food and help their metabolism to burn fat.

• We are fortunate in the US that food is plentiful. I mean, you have to milk the cows, you have to harvest the fields. Since food is so plentiful, I think that even before the crisis, people were going to restaurants less. Most people use food as a means to socialize.

• There is a lot of this resurgence of getting in the kitchen again, and people are cooking. They are involving their children and family members.

• There’s this principle across many cultures where, you know, we say food is love.

• We have to resist the temptation to comfort ourselves with food continually during this time while recognizing that it is very normal to want to do so because it is so soothing. There are other ways, such as reaching out to others, to soothe.

• My mom has finally shared a family recipe that she kept very close to her vest for many years. She finally came out of her comfort zone and shared it on a video with her granddaughter.

• I do subscribe to family cooking. It has helped us during the time.

• While many of the points raised about the revival of family cooking and the joys of healthy eating are important, I think they often miss the point, which is that, in the long run, this is an economic crisis not a health crisis.

• Nutrition is even more important now, more movement and exercise.

• We have to be careful of the types of inflammatory foods we consume. I find it’s even more challenging, especially when you’re trying to limit the amount of times you go out to the grocery stores. In the US, the next two weeks are critical, so try to avoid going to the supermarkets.

• When we talk about healthy eating, I think of the Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean world is about the rhythm. It’s about sitting together. It’s about socializing, timing, color and about eating outdoors. The garden is behind your house. It is about organic foods, not about counting calories.

• If you have cravings and put peanut butter and chocolate, on bread, it might be somewhat healthy. If you have a craving for salt, have a few crackers or a few chips, but not too many.

• I would advise just buy healthy food. This may be an opportunity to train kids about what to eat.

• In India, our prayers before we ate our food had meaning. The prayer was to concentrate on our overall eating style and what we were putting inside our stomachs. It’s important that prayer has a beautiful meaning.

• We recently watched a documentary called The Game Changers. It’s about world nature and what we feel is needed to remain vegetarian.

• There are many areas of innovation in a kitchen to make food preparation a little bit easier and joyful. Our focus is on how to design a Wellness kitchen environment in a way that can enhance and empower humans and wellbeing for the planet.

• This is a wake-up call to families everywhere that cooking is good.

• I’m curious if a move toward a more holistic Mediterranean diet will remain after this pandemic. I think people are just being less restricted about eating.

• We’re seeing people really want easy recipes.

• There’s been countless discussions about the education process such as eating healthy, eating mindfully, etc.

• One thing we always say, and I didn’t come up with this term, but it’s something I always say to people in my program is that there’s been no glory in prevention. That is changing now. There is glory in prevention.

• Some clients are just going along as before, still eating high fat food or unhealthy processed packaged foods. Eventually, they will have high cholesterol or some other negative consequence.

• Even when many people have high cholesterol, it doesn’t result in them making changes.

• However, if all of a sudden someone has cancer, then they usually want to begin eating more healthfully. Sometimes it takes those major situations, those health crises, to make these big changes.

• In an effort to beat getting the virus and stay healthier, I started a six-week detox. I am now on week three and consuming liquids or healthy greens with a lot of alkaline. I eat fairly healthy most of the time.

• There’s an herbal tea that I usually do in the winter for my family, but now we’re all drinking it every morning. The ingredients include ginger, turmeric, honey and lemon.

• Plant-based healthy eating helps with filtering out various diseases and keeps our endothelial cells functioning and our blood vessels healthy and strong. This gives our body more of a chance to fend off environmental toxins that are coming at us.

• At this time, we should be cutting back on the carbs and sugar and eating organic foods that are completely plant based. We often instead put artificial ingredients in our bodies, but our digestion system just doesn’t know how to process them.

• Health is really fundamentally changed by the nutrition that we ingest.

• We are eating a lot of fruit, soups and vegetable juices in Thailand that are easy to digest. I am taking vitamin D to raise up my own nutritional profile.

• At our medical clinic, clients are booking infusions of high dose vitamin C and other kinds of intravenous infusions we’re recommending like zinc and magnesium.

• We must remember that supplements are expensive, some fancy ingredients are expensive.

• Even elaborate meals require the use of power and fuel for stoves, which cost money to operate for a large proportion of people in third world countries.

• We must tell people that they need to keep fit and well to fight off the virus. Do not tell them to stop worrying and grab a packet of peanuts or chips.

• We need to promote things like growing your own food. Simple healthy cooking that does not require hours of cooking.

• Share with people that they can get their vitamin and mineral needs not from expensive fancy supplements, but from very cheap simple vegetables and even wild foods.

• Since the lockdown, we have been following the principle that food can be your medicine. We have been sharing our recipes—and most importantly our many vegan recipes—with our followers and our clients through social media.

• One way to make nutrition a priority is by not having junk food in the house.

• One of the supplements that we highly recommend is probiotics. Fermented vegetables can be used to help boost immunity, and local produce in the Philippines is abundant.

• In the Philippines, coconut oil is something that’s very nutritious. It has a lot of antiviral and antifungal properties and contains a lot of nutrients. Coconut oil is in fact made of 57 percent lauric acid. Lauric acid is said to be the same ingredient in mother’s breast milk, which can boost the immune system. We recommend at least 15 ml of coconut oil in the morning, in the evening, and to use it also for cooking.

• As a reminder—and especially at this moment—wellness should not be

• We cannot cater only to those who have the luxury of choices–houses in the country and access to long walks in nature or even to micro gardens of their own. It is easy to say, “Hey enjoy the free time with your loved ones, fresh air on your terrace and pick fresh veggies from your garden!”

• Not all of us have the luxury of companions and partners to share time with—or remote networks of colleagues and friends we can Zoom to exchange recipes and have virtual dinner parties or cocktails.

• There is space for all of it… for simple and easy nutrition advice; for supplements (some of them work and some don’t); to movement (whether you are inside or out); to creating communities for those who don’t have them; to practical advice. (As an example, do you need to wash your vegetables with soap?)

• Yes, sometimes we binge, we drink, we eat badly—and that is fine—if in general we adhere and are aware of the best practices.

• Along with consuming nutritious vegetables at home, we should be ingesting probiotics and also lots of vitamin C and vitamin D.

• Our home remedies include coconut oil taken every day in the morning on an empty stomach. It definitely helps to neutralize an acidic stomach. And after that, we find that other Ayurvedic herbs like ashwagandha definitely help a lot.

• In Indian culture, the mother cooks the food. The food that I am consuming has to be accepted by my body. That is part of the meaning of the prayers that are said before eating.

• More restaurant customers are requesting more vegetarian, vegan, organic and keto dishes.

• Restaurants are trying to become more health-focused. I think now COVID has been a real reset where consumers are really going to be interested more than ever about the healthfulness of food and the immune boosting effects of food.

• In Australia, the farmers markets are still running in this lockdown. There is also a self-sufficiency model, and a lot more people are starting to grow their own vegetables.

• We are looking forward to opening up a facility as a response center for health care workers, so they can have a wellbeing break.

• In Mexico City, we’re starting to develop wellness real estate projects. Most people are looking for local fresh products. We are eating more vegetables and more fruits, drinking more green tea, and exercising more.

• Wellbeing landmarks consist of fuel consumption, as well as our emotional and mental wellbeing. Fuel consumption is really about how we power our bodies through things like nutrition and hydration.

• For restaurants who want to offer healthy options, instead of trying to get too creative with dishes, it’s better to simply offer people clean whole foods. That will be the best way to support their health.

• Most people in Korea eat healthy all the time. We eat healthy foods like salads.

• We must promote interventions and recommendations that not only are of interest to the typical spa/wellness client, but to families who are struggling to stay alive through this crisis.

• In the last two years, we’ve developed new technology, a digital platform that everybody can access. It contains all the data for restaurants. As a consumer, I can say I want less than 650 calories, less than 60 grams of carbs, and no dairy in my meal, and so the app will go through and find all of the restaurant’s menu items that meet the criteria and display it for the consumer.