Thoughts about nutrition!

Hello everyone! Been thinking about nutrition lately! I have zero problem living out of bins, and foraging for berries, I'm very adaptive. But I am also thinking of times when my immune system might be low (ill, tired, injured) and might need some extra support!
My parents met working for a business called Nature's Sunshine (very romantic) so I grew up on their products.

About Nature's Sunshine:
"Founded by Gene Hughes. With the support of their family they began a small family business, selling encapsulated cayenne and other herbs and supplements. Helping more and more people with their natural products, and sharing the benefits of their knowledge. Nature's Sunshine was the first company to encapsulate herbs, and their commitment to offering only the finest-quality herbal supplements has never wavered." So basically they offer a range of products that can support the body naturally - no nasties!

I bring them up because I intend to bring some of their products along with me (if I have room in backpack!)

Products I am considering bringing:

http://www.naturessunshine.eu/pea_protein_plus_(465g).htm (this is vegan)

http://www.naturessunshine.eu/tnt_(532g).htm (this is not vegan - has milk in)

http://www.naturessunshine.eu/silver_shield_gel_(85g) (you've all heard of silvers healing properties - this stuff is ant-bacterial and stimulates cell growth!)

http://www.naturessunshine.eu/charcoal_(activated)_(100) (this stuff is handy if you eat/drink anything harmful - helps safely take the toxins out of your body!)

Wouldn't want to slow the tribe down if I got ill/had a cold/got injured, so want to make sure I have the stuff I need to get better and stay healthy!
I'm putting this information here in case any one else wanted to look into it and buy any of these products for their travels.
To make sure I don't drain on tribe food resources, every time I have one of the nutrition or protein drinks I won't participate in 'solid' food
Hope it was ok to share this here
Love to the tribe x

Hey!

I'm very into nutrition also, I'm vegetarian for 13 years now and it was one of my parents's condition for me to be allowed to become vegetarian to get to learn about body's need!

It can be good for the beggining to bring those, but that would be even better is for us to learn to make these by ourselves as you won't have enougth space in your backpack for one years of caps (also it's expensive compared to the free market in the mountains)! Europe is filled with medicinal and eatable plants which are full of complete proteins, vitamins and good healthy stuff! Our bodies know to take the most of these plants as humanity ate those since its very beggining, unlike the vegetable we eat now so I think you'll be surprise how fit you're gonna be haha!

Charcoal will be usual, as ashes, as we will make fires quite often.
Silver may be the only thing you won't find easily, and bring maybe some clay also as we never know what's in the clay we find in the nature! It's very effective against the usual diarrhea/pucking disease people get when they suddenly share the life of dirty hippies or when bad water has been drunk. Charcoal is more like an antipoison, soaking toxins etc and is very effective in some case... clay is more like soaking bigger stuff and bandaging the stomac while being antibacterial... very useful! And it has other use (brushing teeth, healing skin, getting splinters out etc...)

Maybe your parents have good info/books/pdf about plants and nutritional needs you could share with us during the travel? I have good books to reconize plants (no worries, it's not like in "Into the wild" in Europe, haha!) and I already learnt a good bunch of things about wild plants!

I also agree that a plant based diet is a healthy choice, which I have been following for the past years.
There are physiological consequences of changing dietary habits suddenly. Maybe we could keep some sort of track of what we put into our stomach.
I am not talking about registering the daily caloric intake, but rather do something only to be sure we ingest just enough macro and micro-nutrients.

I wonder how many of the food we will eat will be from:
-dumpster diving,
-harvesting with field owners,
-asking for the ripe soon-to-be-thrown-away produce,
-work in exchange for meals
-gathered in the wilderness.
-bought

What are your thoughts on this one?

I am interested in having sort of a mapped "database" of the places where we can find food, what type, amount, at what season, etc.
This could be done prior to arriving to the locals, internet research, and completed throughout the day.

I personaly don't have so much preferencies. The ends of markets are I think my favorite choice, they're quite everywhere, they're usualy quite full of vegetables, we can make a nice show during the market itself to get some coins for the gas and the rice... We'll try not to spend to much money in general, it learns us to do otherways and allows us to invest (musical instruments, another vehicule, a solar panel, whatever is broken and need to be fixed/replaced, a ferry... whatever we feel could be helpful to go further in our apprenticeship or travel!)

It depends also on who will be coming, I met some crazy dumpsterdiver finding treasures from the trashes. We may find a lot of stuff for doing art or crafting jungling stuffs from the trashes so I guess we'll have quite some big bin-sessions! I hope although that we can afford a non-dumpsted option for the eventual fragile guts. But ends of markets are good enougth I think!

About the mapped database, the wildness is so full of food all the time (except when it snows but we'll try to avoid this kind of adventure...) it would be long and repetitive to build such a thing... As long as we're in Europe the plants are quite always the same... But maybe you meant something different from what I imagine, if you feel like doing this you're welcome to give it a try for sure!

About works in exchange for meal, it would have not to be impacting too much in the evolution of our studies. We can't do everything, when we work we can't study, or at least we're then studying one specific job quite intensively. For sometimes why not, but we have so much to learn already! Of course if we're invited in a community we will participate, and if someone borrows us a field to stay and give us food we'll give him 15 helpful pairs of hands at disposal! But it's not something I want to focus on. Do you?