There’s a lot of talk about the ‘obesity’ crisis and no shortage of ideas as to it’s cause and it’s cure. Luckily, I don’t have a weight problem, actually, it’s got nothing to do with luck, just good eating habits. When it comes to food, I have a fairly straight forward philosophy – if it isn’t real, don’t eat it – at least not in large quantities, and if you can afford to, go for the organic. I’m not saying I never eat a biscuit or some chocolate but my diet is about 97% good, and 3% less good. That figure is reducing daily because the dreaded hot flushes have started and I’ve found that certain things exacerbate them, sugar in all it’s forms is one of the worst, along with tea and coffee too, to a lesser extent, so I’m in the process of removing them from my diet, although I had cut the tea down to about two cups a week.
I am not a fan of fast food and because I’ve never had a lot of money, I make most of my own meals from scratch. I have tried McDonalds and quite frankly, you won’t find me in there unless I’m absolutely starving and there is nowhere else open, and when it comes to fast food, nothing is faster than a banana, just peel and eat or even quicker, an apple, you don’t even have to peel it.
The thinking behind my eating habits is this, I am a human being, I evolved over thousands of years like the rest of the animal life on this planet. I am part of the eco-system. My body was designed to eat the food that occurs naturally on this earth, which is meat and fish, fruit and vegetables and some crops.
If you look at the list of ingredients in something like those fake butter type spreads, there are ingredients in them, I can’t even pronounce. They’re full of chemicals and colourings and flavourings. Now I am a human being, NOT a chemical processing plant. The human body was not made to process this kind of stuff. A case in point, Diet Coke. Everyone I know who drinks this stuff has two things in common, they have a weight problem and they are addicted to it, and it’s disgusting, it’s just a tin of coloured water with chemicals in it. Now, ask yourself a question, would you give Diet Coke to a dog to drink? The answer of course, is no, (at least I hope it is) so if you wouldn’t give it to a dog, why would you give it to a child?
Taste like everything else, develops over time and the more real food you eat, the more your taste for it will develop.
Now not everyone can cook, and I remember watching one of those reality cooking shows about diet a few years back, and it showed a family in which there were four children, and neither of the parents could cook. I was stunned, I couldn’t understand how you could have four children and not cook, not to mention the huge expense buying processed food or having takeaways all the time. Eating is a basic human necessity, we all have to eat so we should all learn how to cook.
Now, I’m not slagging off people who can’t cook. I understand there were changes to our eating habits with the advent of frozen and processed food in the sixties, coupled with the invention of the microwave oven and the removal of cookery classes from schools under the Thatcher government. (although I think they are now back on the curriculum, and if they’re not they should be) This created a hole in our diets which has been filled up with overly sweetened, salted and processed food, full of the aforementioned colourings, flavourings and whatever else they put in there.
Realistically, this stuff just can’t be doing us any good. Now, most of us know who Gillian McKeith is, and I know she came in for a lot of stick about her fake science and fake degree, and she was a bit extreme, but one thing you can’t argue against and that is, she got results. She took stones off people and added years to their lives.
I watched another programme recently on GM crops, and to be honest I didn’t really know much about them and had always thought how harmful could a crop be? Well, extremely harmful is the answer. This programme was about crops in India and how companies have genetically modified the wheat and cotton crops so they don’t generate seed, so the farmers have to keep going back and buying new seed every year from these companies. But the scary thing about these crops is that they suspect they killed cattle. What happened was, the cattle started dying and when they opened them up they found that one of the stomachs in the cows, (they have four) had dried up. They put it down to lack of natural enzymes in the food they had eaten. Scary stuff. I also read recently that some researchers believe that ‘man boobs’ are caused by wheat in the diet. How do we even know if the wheat used in baking is GM free? Mostly we don’t.
There’s an arrogance in science that thinks it can do better than nature, that thousands of years of evolution can be disregarded and that we have the right to screw around with nature as much as we like, with no consideration for the consequences. I watched another programme a couple of years ago about plagues, and every plague they discussed was caused by man screwing around with nature, from rabbits and mice in Australia, to killer bees in South America, every one was down to man’s interference. We get so carried away by what we can do, we never stop to question if we should do it.
So people, think on, you owe it to yourself and your health. Eat well and organic as much as possible, and go for the real food. Start today, try and cut out the sugar or at least to cut it down; throw out those manky fake butters and treat yourself to the real thing, there’s nothing to beat it for taste.
Comments as usual, are welcome.