Food and Health:
Food Equals Health
by Leah Day
What are our basic necessities? We all need to eat food, drink liquids, and breathe air. That's the basics. Without these bare-bones requirements met, we would die in a matter of minutes, hours, or days. So why are so many people so unhealthy? We are living in a civilized culture after all. Why aren’t we the healthiest beings on the planet?
The problem is choice. If the food and liquids we have to choose to consume are as limited as the choice of air we breathe, we wouldn’t have too much difficulty picking. Most of us don't really think about air when we're breathing it. Oh yeah, we might think about it when choosing to sit in the smoking or nonsmoking sections of a resturant, but we don’t choose each breath with the extreme discrimination with witch we view food or liquids. I am sure most people will mindlessly walk into a freshly painted room and not think twice about breathing in the fumes from the paint. We need to breathe, therefore, we do it aimlessly.
If we had to eat and drink as often as we breathe, we wouldn’t have the capability of really considering what we put into our bodies. Birds are one animal I can think of that do have to eat this often. A bird must be constantly eating or looking for food in order to survive. Their metabolism is so fast and efficient that consuming a high fat, high calorie diet is not a problem for them. They are meant to eat almost constantly. Human are not meant to eat that often and, therefore, we should all have the time to consider the foods and liquids we put into our bodies with at least some amount of discrimmination.
I know the excuses:
- It is so difficult to know how to eat right.
- It takes so much time to get healthy food.
- Healthy food doesn’t taste good.
- It is very expensive to eat healthy.
- I feel sick when I eat healthy.
- I don’t even know what healthy eating is!
Okay, so the list can go on and on. Honestly, the excuses don’t matter a bit to me. Excuses are what guilty people use to make themselves feel better. The point I am trying to emphasize is this:
If you do not have the time to think about what you're putting into your body, then you don't have the time to live.
If you are a busy person and are happy feeling sick, then fine - eat and drink whatever you want. Oh I am so heartless? Yep, I am. The simple fact is that your health is directly linked to what you put into your body. You put in chips and soft drinks and fast food on a regular basis and you are going to become one sick puppy. No, you are not going to get a fever, or the flu, or any of the normal symptoms of “sick." Instead you will be aflicted with excessive gas, constipation, diarrhea, nausea, stomach aches, acid reflux, acne, shortness of breath, and of course the resulting lethargy from feeling any number of these symptoms.
The wonderous American Medical Association along with the mighty pharmacetical companies do not want you to eat right. They do not want you to know that you alone can fix your bad health symptoms. They want to drug you up with medications that will suppress your sick feelings, but not actually cure the root cause of the problems. Would doctors make any money if all they said was, “Well, I do believe that all these symptoms will go away if you change your eating habits and drank more water.” Hell no, they wouldn’t make a dime, but you would become a much healthier person.
So where do I get the accredidations to make these statements? I am not a doctor and would never like to be. I just want people to be as healthy as they can be. In my experience, optimum health is achieved by good diet, not by a good quantity of drugs. This returns to my opening point: if we had less choice, a healthy diet would not be a problem. We choose to eat fast food rather than make ourselves a sandwich. We choose to drink a soft-drink rather than water.
Why? Sometimes the choice is made because it seems easier. Grabbing fast food is quicker than fixing yourself a meal. It may also seem cheaper when comparing the cost of all the groceries you would have to buy to make yourself a sandwich. In the long term, however, the consequences to your health will make fast food a very expensive choice. Also, taste is a contributing factor to food choice. The idea of drinking tastless water when you could have a sugary coke is just not appetizing.
Well, it's time to choose what life you want. Do you want to take the easy way out and continue eating junk and feeling like crap? Do you want to spend most of your life popping pills to suppress your nasty symptoms? I am not saying I make the best food choices for myself each and every day either. I still eat fast food on occasion and drink soft-drinks when I crave them. The trick is to make bad eating the exception, not the rule. Health experts like to use the word “moderation." I don’t like this word because it doesn’t really explain how to eat. I prefer “balance." Eat some bad food when you crave it, but balance that bad meal with a mostly healthy diet.
So the next time you are considering what you want to eat or drink, think about your health and how you're feeling right now. If you are craving some junk food and decide it is worth a stomach ache or a gassy night, then go for it, but if you find yourself in a rut of eating fast food every day for lunch stop making excuses for it and start working to balance your diet. I promise you'll feel better!
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