Is What You Eat Food?
Whenever we shopping for groceries to buy some food for ourselves or to feed our loved ones, it is good to clearly understand the two fundamental questions: Who We Are and What Food Is?
Who We Are?
Everything in the world occurs in agreement with the Natural Law of the Universe and humans are no exception. Survival of the humanity as a whole depends on how soon we establish and sustain a cyclic balanced equilibrium with our planet which produces no waste. Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
In turn, personal survival depends on the person’s internal balance, called human homeostasis, which is affected not only by the environment but also, of course, by the person’s choices, that is lifestyle.
Unfortunately, too often we do not realize that what we chose to eat and drink may disrupt our homeostasis and destroy our life. “Many people are like clams–mostly liver and stomach; or, perhaps I should say they are like worms–all gut. Dr. E. E. Keeler says in Here’s How Health Happens: “The stomach according to the clam and some other people, is a bag of an indefinite expansive capacity useful to hold any old thing that the palate may enjoy and as much of the commodity as may be obtained.” We are lured to our doom by our appetites; yet, surely we cannot take every appetite and any and every association for normal. “Accustom your appetite to obey reason with willingness,” advised Plutarch.”
Here is Victor Irons’s of Sonne’s Organic Foods concept of health, which while may look like an exaggeration, makes a lot of sense:
“THERE IS ONLY ONE SUPREME POWER, THERE IS ONLY ONE CAUSE OF DISEASE, THERE IS ONLY ONE DISEASE, AND THEREFORE, THERE IS ONLY ONE TREATMENT FOR ALL DISEASE.”
This approach is based on principles of Natural Law that states that the bloodstream will keep the body in perfect health if it is properly nourished and is able to remove all waste products from the body. The more we deviate from normal human food, the less human we become.
What Food Is?
In short, FOOD = NUTRITION. Food additives are NOT food. The more food additives added the less food you eat, the less healthy you are. According to the Wikipedia, food is defined as any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is ingested by an organism and assimilated by the organism’s cells in an effort to produce energy, maintain life, or stimulate growth.
Over 80 years ago Herbert M. Shelton gave the following similar definition of food: “Food, we define as any substance the elements of which are convertible into, and do form, the constituent matters of the tissues and fluids of the body and are employed by the organism in the performance of any of its functions. Life depends on food. All growth, repair and maintenance of tissues and all development of vital power are the results of nutrition. All parts and products of the body are elaborated from the blood, and all the functions of the body depend upon the blood for material supplies. The blood is elaborated from air, water, food and sunshine. These are essential and all that are essential, so far as materials are concerned, for the production of good blood and sound tissues and organs and functional results.”
We must eat nutritious food because “7,000,000 of the 25,000,000,000,000 red blood cells in the body of an average man die every second, so that 7,000,000 new ones must be produced every second of our lives — a wonderful example of the creative operations always at work in our bodies. The materials out of which these new cells are built are supplied by food. This represents only a small part of the creative work that goes on. Similar destruction and reconstruction occur in other tissues of the body.”
What We Do To Our Food And What Our Food Does To Us
The below some essential quotations from The Hygienic System by Herbert M. Shelton are given.
WE HAVE DENATURED OUR FOOD. By denatured foods is meant foods that have been so altered and impaired in the processes of manufacturing, bleaching, canning, cooking, preserving, pickling, etc., that they are no longer as well fitted to meet the needs of the body as they were in the state Nature prepared them.
I am convinced that the habit of eating denatured foods is a chief cause of over eating. These foods do not completely nourish the body and, therefore, do not satisfy the demands of hunger, unless consumed in large quantities. Great variety at a meal also over stimulates the sense of taste and leads to over eating. Spices and condiments have the same effect. It is really difficult to overeat when one is eating unseasoned foods.
Except for the fresh fruits and vegetables you eat, practically everything you have on your table has had something done to it. Your milk is pasteurized, condensed, evaporated, boiled; your eggs are from hens that lay two or three hundred eggs a year and are fed on “rich” fare that produces disease in them. Your sugar is the crystallized, refined and bleached sap of cane or beet that has had all the minerals and vitamins removed from it. Your cereals are cracked, rolled, hammered, frittered, curled, flaked, ironed and even “shot from cannon,” they are roasted, twice roasted, boiled, and in other ways rendered foodless. Wheat is milled, its minerals and vitamins removed, the flour is bleached and chemicalized. Its most important food elements are removed in the milling process. Your flesh foods are embalmed, smoked, pickled, salted, canned, corned, sausaged, fried, baked, broiled, refrigerated, cold-stored and kept for long periods before being eaten. They are often drugged to give them color or flavor. Perhaps they come from sick animals. Your dried fruits are heated in drying, bleached with sulfur dioxide, stored for long periods of time and, finally, stewed and mixed with white sugar before being eaten.
The refining, preserving and cooking processes to which our foods are subjected destroy extraordinarily delicate and tender vital food factors. The refining and cooking processes rob foods of so much of their values that we add salt, sugar, spices, pepper and various other condiments and seasonings to them to make them palatable. Without the additions of such things they are dull, flat, and insipid. Not so natural foods. Nature has placed delicate flavors and aromas in her foods that appeal to the senses of taste and smell.
Sunk into the degenerating grip of gluttony, their mental attitudes become transposed into its corresponding physical attitude–that of the groveling swine. Every individual who is a slave under his appetite,–be he vegetarian, fruitarian or carnivorian–who eats for the mere sake of appetite and sensuous indulgence, is a glutton in his nature, an egotist in his motive and a swine in his attitude.
GLUTTONY: WE ALL EAT TOO MUCH. Here in this country intemperate eating is one of our universal faults. Almost all of us are guilty of it, not merely occasionally, but habitually and almost uniformly, from the cradle to the grave. Even the sick are urged to eat, in many instances to gorge themselves, in spite of the loudest warnings and strongest protests of nature.
“No man ever ate too little,” declared Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Surfeiting has destroyed more lives than starving. For everyone who suffers from underfeeding there are ninety and nine who suffer from gluttony. The markets of the world are glutted with foods of all kinds, as they never were before in the world’s history. Their abundance, tempting variety and comparative cheapness, coupled with the many means employed to whip up an over-stimulated and sated appetite to “fresh indulgence in the tempting, but life-withering concoctions of extravagant cooking, with its embalmed preserves, alcoholized liquids, crystallized fruits, frozen creams, aniline dyed dainties, and the constantly increasing nondescript menaces known as pies, puddings and French pastries–there is certainly a tremendous need for instructing the people in what not to eat.
Habits of eating are usually acquired in infancy and are cultivated, nourished and developed throughout childhood and youth. They do not tend to correct themselves spontaneously. They continue with us as imperious masters, calling as loudly as ever for gratification. A dyspeptic, eating three to six meals a day, is always craving food; though overeating he is literally starving to death. It would be an astounding revelation to many doctors and dyspeptics to watch a fast in such cases and see how quickly the abnormal appetite rights itself and how rapidly the nutritive processes improve.
Gluttony, especially the common overindulgence in incongruous food mixtures, leads to gastro-intestinal fermentation and putrefaction, with the resulting poisoning from this source. This leads to the destruction of the body’s reserves which are designed for the preservation of health and strength until a ripe old age is attained. Temperate eaters have good digestion and are never aware that they have stomachs, while heavy eaters are always faint, thirsty, bloated, troubled with acidity, eruptions, diarrhea, constipation or some other disorder of the digestive system. Hoggishness causes all kinds of disorders that we attempt to remedy by various kinds of magic, but continue to practice the hoggish eating.
Ignorance Is What Kills Your Health
A nation whose diet is made up almost wholly of such foodless foods cannot possibly be well nourished. Why go to great lengths and much trouble to build up our soils and then take everything out of the foods that the improved soils have put into them? When physicians prescribe such foods for infants and young children, for pregnant and nursing mothers and for patients they display both a lamentable ignorance of food values and a callous indifference to the welfare of children, mothers and patients. When they eat such foods themselves and feed them to their own children, they reveal that ignorance is their most prominent characteristic.
It is time for us to learn that we are not “in tune with the Infinite” so long as we are regularly transgressing any of the laws of life. Nature does not sanction any form of intemperance. A league of temperate eaters would certainly find a large field for reform.
Let’s educate ourselves and start making informed healthy food choices!
Category: Healthy diet
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