BLOG: Are you what you eat?

Author: Harm Custers – Head of Marketing at Takii Europe B.V.

It takes radicle preventive measures to battle COVID-19. Governments and organizations are substantially investing in the development of a vaccine against the novel virus, which is what primarily the world needs for impact on the short term. Secondarily, it is of great importance to stand side by side on boosting our resilience to come out of such a crisis in a sustainable healthy way. For many, this requires a lifestyle change, with vegetable food in the lead.

Being a breeding company, we are proud to contribute to the production of safe and healthy food, which is part of Takii’s mission. In our breeding process, resilience is of major importance! A resilient crop is the result of the right genetics, healthy starting material and excellent crop care. A resilient crop is more resistant to stress factors, such as (ever adjusting) diseases – resulting in better performance and longer crop life.

Paralleling it with humans, this means that working on our health (resilience) should, therefore, be top-of-mind!  So that also in the longer term, we can increase the resistance against diseases.

With proper nutrition, health gains are made and health issues could be prevented. With a healthy diet, we mainly eat vegetables and fewer animal products. Fortunately, there are international initiatives to make healthy food more accessible and better known. A recent and excellent example is the joint appeal to Dutch politicians to include healthy food in their election programmes.  The manifest is also full of ideas to stimulate vegetable and fruit consumption.

The goal of our health care should be to let as many people as possible live in the greatest possible health, with good nutrition at the base. I say: power to the vegetables! Yet the main responsibility for health care (in addition to businesses and governments) is reserved for everyone personally. So let’s all eat more veggies, it is healthy and delicious! That should not be so complicated, right?

What about your daily vegetable intake? Are you what you eat?