Over the years, people have become more and more conscious about which food to eat to stay healthy. Over the years too, several recommendations have been advised. To this end, books were written, keep fit programs were sold and advices followed. The average lifespan though stayed the same, seventy years, much the same as centuries ago.

What are the foods to eat to stay healthy? Everything but in moderation

Doesn’t it sound very much like what the Hebrew book says?” Lifespan of seventy years”, “all food have been cleansed”, “avoid gluttony?” Through all these years, this has never been challenged. This fact remained sure and true. If ever, several adverts have already claimed superior benefits of their weight reducing, health-inducing product. What the adverts succeeded at was over-selling and over- highlighting their claims but never challenged this fact. But that is always true with commercialism. In this age where cents and dimes are often the rule of the day, there is no compunction to oversell a product to the point of using scare tactics for the targeted consumer to get their attention and possibly draw out their wallets and part with their money.

Do not fall for fad foods. If they were true, some of them should have stayed on in the market and have grown in market share as far as food choices are concerned. Nothing has and nothing will, because the price paid is too high for the benefit received and people eventually could see through that.

Instead eat food that tastes good. Eat all foods that are recommended in the good old food chart. The body needs sodium, it helps cleanse the body and prevent diseases. The body needs fat. Fat insulates us from the elements and helps keep our body lubricated as machines are lubricated. Fat also keeps our skin supple and feeling younger. Have protein in the diet, you cannot do with less of it especially when in the healing and during the growing up years. Calories are needed to maintain energy levels so is sugar. But then everything has to be taken in the right amounts and quantities. Everything in moderation

The problem is not the food; the problem is the attitude towards food. It is the preference of one food group over the other that keeps the system unbalanced and wanting of nutrients that weakens the body. It is the lifestyle that prevents us or allows excuses not to eat right but have fast food as the usual recourse.

Aside from the food groups that have been classified by science, there are only two types of food in nature that are provided to us. One is food for nutrition, the other are food for medicine and healing. Examples of these are garlic, turmeric and other herbs too many to mention. Every food has its own function and counter action. Spinach has oxalic acid and oranges have counter effects bad for certain blood types, eating raw exposes us to certain microorganisms etc. Nonsense, every food has properties different and tends to counter balance another food.

In an effort to sell a product, a brand, or an idea, what results is a scare that effects in limiting us with food choices often to those that we do not enjoy. The limiting of food choices keeps on evolving that if everything that is heard or advertised is listened to, nothing is worthy of eating anymore.

Every region on earth will always provide a balanced food source for that region. Foods grown in the US are different from those grown in China. But when examined closely, the tastes may change but the same balancing effect in the diet is present, anywhere in the world. That should tell us something. The earth provides everything for our enjoyment and health. Anyone who is not trying to sell anything will say the same thing, “that we should eat all the food groups in correct quantities and proportions”. That way we enjoy life, that way we stay truly healthy.

Every day one or two health foods are introduced into the market promising superior health benefits. Almost every month, bookstores will stock up on books that sell health, dieting and weight management programs. On the TV, exercise programs and exercise machines are advertised to keep you healthy, fit and a life of longevity. The fact is all of these work, the question is, is it really necessary?

Exotic Sounding Foods

You probably have heard of the Acai berry, fig leaves, bitter melon, green tea, and so many other exotic sounding foods. Do they work? They do, but so do other foods. There is nothing wasted on Gods earth. The proof of that is when the excitement for these foods wanes, another food will crop up, the benefits overstated, and orders will start coming in increasing the demand, spiking prices for the products until a new one appears.

Is it worth it? Well, that depends on how deep your wallet is. The truth is that every food that is natural has its own benefit that when examined closely will always reveal special properties that are waiting for an advertiser’s attention. The properties then could be highlighted depending on current health and commercial climate. The carrot consumed like crazy some years back due to it beta-carotene property is now relegated to the background in place of “new food discoveries”. In today’s stiff commercial competition, the point to remember is that when it sounds too good to be true, then probably it is not.

Fad Foods

Everybody loves to have a good figure and wants six-pack abs, everybody, and why not. When the figure is good, employment is easier to find, earning potential increases, the body feels light, looks so much healthier, younger, and energized.

What is wrong with fad foods is that it is not telling us the whole truth. If Halle Berry for example gave birth last week and appear today on TV with the same figure, everybody will be curious. The TV host knows that and so the question that would be asked is the diet that keeps her figure “bathing suit” perfect. Whatever answer Halle Berry gives will get the audience’s attention and telephone will start ringing for orders. What will not be mentioned is that stars maintain a host of dietitians, physicians and exercise guru’s working for the sole purpose of keeping the image of the star and maintaining it. The diet may be true but it is only a part of the whole regimen of things observed to make the star look good on camera. Rests also are monitored, exercises are supervised let alone food intake, to keep the star healthy.

Eat, exercise, rest, and work.

The natural things that we do provided it is kept on a good balance are always the best. It has kept people alive for thousands of years; it will keep the person healthy for many more. Eat a variety of food. All food is good provided the person eats variety and strives for a balanced diet. Exotic sounding and foreign delicacies and specialties are not required nor needed. Food grown in every region is sufficient and balanced for the needs of people living in that region. The key in maintaining natural health is balance, variety, and common sense.

Epistle 26 – Computers

Maybe they’re just a fad. Computers, I mean. That’s what I thought when I first met one in college. It was a big, hulking monster that you timidly fed punch cards in hopes of some grand pronouncement from the Beast, or at least a passing grade. It was like a carnival fortune-telling machine, only less reliable and without a raven-haired gypsy painted on the front.

I was in quest of a regression, correlation, rectal analysis, or something geeky like that, and had carefully filled in my stack of data cards with just the right information. That part took weeks and there was a foreboding sense the slightest blemish in the wrong place, like a beer stain, for instance, would strip the gears of the ravenous Beast and bring it grinding to a halt. At least I hoped so.

Alas, it was not to be. A week later I anxiously reported to the computer lab (an apt description for a room that compared favorably with Dr. Frankenstein’s lab) to learn that the Beast had gone tilt. The inference was that my stack of punch cards contained an evil message. Something erotic, I hope.

As it turned out, the Beast ate a lot of punch cards, producing only indigestion among the student body; the project was cancelled; and I concluded that if I ever needed a computer in my life, I would have to hire a geek. And then someone steeped in the occult invented the personal computer, and life as we knew it was forever altered, mostly for the worse. I now am the proud owner of four computers plus a cell phone that nags me with email messages anywhere on earth. Furthermore, none of them will play well together.

I’ve heard rumors that they sometimes cooperate on networks, but you couldn’t prove it by me. I’ve spent a small fortune trying to achieve some sense of teamwork, but they all treat me like a goof, running from one to another with a little stick of information that I plug in the side just so I can repeat everything I’ve done on all the others. Sometimes, even the little stick refuses to help and sends me an evil message, just like it’s ancestors, the punch cards.

I’m sure that I am somehow complicit in all this lunacy. Most of the human race says it’s because I use Macs (plus a blueberry or a gooseberry or whatever), which cost a lot more but are really cool. Well, maybe so, but I think it’s just one more major social trend with which I am woefully out of step, in typical Boomer fashion.

Hmm . . . maybe I can bring harmony to my private cyberspace if I cram this old-fashioned 3×5 card into this slot . . .

We Will Win