Sunday Story...Food as We know it

Sunday Story…Food as We know It

Food is one of the most important things in your life. Right after air and water, without food life becomes very difficult very quickly. Yet we treat food like it doesn’t count. We worry about air pollution and second hand smoke. We worry about the quality of our water…so much so that we spend about $10.00 a gallon for bottled water. Yet we go to the store and buy the cheapest, worst quality food we can get, without much consideration to the stuff that may be on or in that food.

This does not make much sense. As a matter of fact it is a bit of a paradox. The food I eat is directly related to my health and yet I begrudgingly spend every dollar I have to on the food I put in my body. At no time in history and nowhere else on the planet has a country ever spent less on their food than we do here in America when computed as a percentage of income.

We live in a society of abundance. The grocery store has thousands of products for us to choose from and in most areas there is more than one store to go to. Yet with all those choices we are swiftly becoming the most malnourished people on the planet. We eat but we don’t get nourished. It’s kind of like hearing but not listening or looking without seeing. Eating and dying of starvation.

One of the major problems in our abundance is the huge amount of misinformation there is available to us. Food labels are purposefully deceptive. What we are sold as healthy may not be healthy, except to the food manufacturers’ bottom line. And their job is to sell more food, sell it at the highest profit possible, and get it to the consumer as cheap as they can make it. It is kind of like accepting the lowest bid for your brain surgery. Do you really want the cheapest doctor and hospital performing your brain surgery? Or do you want the best?

Food is the same. Do you really want the cheapest food you can put in your body…the foods that were produced with cheapest ingredients, without an eye toward quality control? Or do you want to put the best most nourishing food into the temple that is your body?

If you answered yes to that last question….keep reading. If you answered no, well, you can keep reading but I don’t know why you would. The manufactured food industry has only the best interest of their shareholders at heart. Their job is to addict you to the food you are eating, so you buy more and more food and consume more and more food. 20 years ago there was no 64oz big gulp. Coffee wasn’t served in 24 oz cups. Folks a cup of coffee is supposed to be 6-8 oz. If you are consuming a 24 oz coffee you are getting about 4 servings of coffee! Small wonder why your adrenal glands are over worked…caffeine is a stress producing agent in your body.
We are addicted to the worst parts of the processed food on our plates. Sugar, fat and salt are all served in abundance in processed food. And the processed food companies have figured out how to produce food with those ingredients in just the right proportions to do three things…#1 create an environment in your body that will have you demand more of those products, #2 have you feel poorly when you don’t get them, #3 make them just cheap enough that feel like you are getting a great deal. And they are making a killing on killing you. Killing you slowly yes but killing you nonetheless.

Granted you have free will to choose whether or not to eat them. But the marketing arms of these companies are very very good at their jobs. Why else would they use cartoon characters to addict your children? Why else would they appeal to your health sensitivities by making claims like…”all natural” or “like nature intended” or “low fat” (but high sugar) or “low in carbs” (but high fat)? The marketing of food is a billion dollar industry. And it has one job…to convince you to eat more of their product. King size candy bars? Liters of soda or Gatorade or juice all designed and packaged to get you to drink or eat even more. Folks you are going to have to take charge of your health and that means taking charge of the food you eat.

And you are what you eat. And you are what your food ate or what was put on it. So if your beef ate steroids, antibiotics, chicken litter (that’s right the beef industry fed over 1 million tons of chicken waste to their beef in feed lots last year!), growth hormones and who know what else you are eating that stuff. And if the chicken you are eating was washed in bleach to kill the nasty little bugs left on it (from fecal material no less) guess what you are getting some too. Cows are supposed to eat grass not other cows, chicken poop, or corn. Chickens are supposed to eat bugs and seeds, and green things not other animals.

So where do you start? How do you get off this roller coaster? Start by reading every label on every product you are buying. If you don’t want to read then don’t buy food that has labels! No label on carrots, broccoli or apples. Buy meat from non-factory farms. Yes it will cost more so eat less. A portion of protein should be about 4 oz. or about the size of your palm. The rest of your plate should be green! If you think this is expensive you should look at your whole food budget and then look at how much you can get from the produce aisle. By cutting out manufactured foods you will be surprised how much you can save to buy the good foods. And if we factor in the loss of production because you are sick more often than you should be, the rising cost of sick care, and the lost years of your life due to poor diet choices well the cost of eating good food that is good for you goes way down.

I will go on about this again next week. It is so important to your health that you eat in a way that serves your optimum health and fitness. And that serves your psychological relationship with food. Don’t try to change it all at once though…going cold turkey on sugar and glucose after a lifetime of addiction will not only be hard on your psyche but your body will go through withdrawal and then you really won’t want to do it. Be gentle on yourself and understand that the journey to eating for health and fitness begins with a decision to begin.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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