How and why we eat boils down to the interplay between our physiological condition and what food is available to us. Whether we eat to sustain our health or simply to satisfy hunger has a huge impact on our long term health prospects. How we choose to eat in our youth has a major impact on our heath beginning in middle age. Are we simply an organic boiler that we can feed any kind of fuel and expect to stay healthy? The answer is no. There are qualitative as well as quantitative considerations.
Eating simply to eliminate hunger was reasonably safe as recently as 60 years ago. However, the introduction of refined foods, sugar, chemical additives, and eventually a world-wide distribution network (that allows foods from any climatic zone to be available anywhere any time of year) has made that an increasingly dangerous proposition.
As generations of poor eaters come and go, the negative effects of eating without considering the effects of food on our energy and internal systems results in poor health at an increasingly younger age. The baby boomers (those born between the 1940s and 1960s) were the first generation to be exposed to the bulk of the artificial ingredients and chemical laced consumer products that we currently come into contact with every day of our lives. The younger generations will face a prodigious minefield of health harming substances for their entire lifespan.
The explosion of degenerative diseases in the last twenty years is the direct result of the contamination of our food and living environment. 1.6 million new cancer cases a year, 50,000 new cases of heart disease, 1.4 million new cases of diabetes, 50,000 new cases of lung disease, the list goes on, and that is just in the U.S.A. (Data from the CDC website.)
If we don’t start looking out for ourselves, paying attention to what we put in, on, and around our bodies, the greatest generation will be the last relatively healthy one.
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