You Absolutely Are What You Eat
You are what you eat. Trite? Maybe. True? Absolutely!
If you want to know why you...why we as a society...are sick, you need look no further than what you put into your body...what you eat, drink, breathe, what you inject into your children, what pills you swallow, what chemicals you use to clean your house and spray on your lawn. The list is endless. The century-long experiment of “better living” through chemistry and industrial food has borne out to be a failure, and we the guinea pigs are paying the price.
The answer to the chronic illness riddle is simple. We have the food industry and the chemical industry to thank for our common plight. Modern medicine does not have the answer; it, too, is part of the problem. It cannot heal our ailments and cure our diseases...not only from inability, but also from lack of motivation...sickness is more profitable than health. And modern "chemical" cures are no cure at all.
The only way to solve the “sickness” dilemma is to take back your body and your environment. You must become responsible for what you do to yourself. To build and preserve real health, you must eat Real Food...pure, natural, honest-to-goodness FOOD.
Due in large part to the growing popularity of Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions and numerous Real Food bloggers, many people are becoming familiar with the important work of Weston Price. His vastly enlightening tome, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, is a must-read for anyone desiring to understand why and how food creates and affects our health. The results of his research (compiled in the 1920s-1930s) are incredible! In a nutshell, Price travelled and studied native peoples’ diets worldwide. He compared their health, development and vitality on their traditional diets to that of their newly adopted “imported” diets (this was during the advent of U.S-produced processed/industrialized food).
Price discovered that when people consume industrialized, processed/refined foods, their health degenerates and their children’s physical development degrades. For example, the new generations being raised primarily on the processed foods had improperly developed facial bones. This resulted in poor sinus and tooth palate development...it was the first time that those people groups experience such health problems. The children had sinus malfunctions (stuffy nose syndrome, sinus infections, etc.) and their mouths couldn’t hold all their teeth, nor did the teeth develop properly. (Price was seeing the common modern dental problems we think are “normal” today). Also, the people on the “new” diet suffered from lowered immunity...another new development in their history. The children contracted illnesses they had never known before, such as tuberculosis. This is just the "tip" of the proverbial iceberg. Price's book is a monumental opus, and a must-read!
What we eat makes or breaks our health and our children’s bodies’ proper development. And the quality of the meat, eggs, and milk products that we consume is only as good as the diet given to the animal. We can’t be properly nourished by animals who aren’t properly nourished or reared. Animals need to eat their natural diets and they need to live in natural environments.
There is no better time than now to become educated and to fight for our rights to real food, clean air and water, freedom from government-imposed “medicine.” Being well and staying well is as simple as eating clean food, avoiding chemical toxicity and pharmaceuticals, and learning to use the natural healing plants created for our benefit. Sadly, the decades-long toxification of our food and environment has created weaknesses and mutations in us all. We cannot turn back the clock overnight and regain our rightful wellness and healthy longevity. But we can, one step at a time, stop the madness that has become our modern industrial way of life.
What our industrialized food system has created is neither good, nor pure, nor even real food. Food cannot be industrially mass-produced without being corrupted. Modern farming practices, such as monoculture planting, genetic engineering, animal concentration camps, unnatural animal dietary practices, synthetic fertilizers and chemical herbicides/fungicides/pesticides, etc. have raped the ground; depleted soil and plant nutrients; produced poison milk, eggs, and meat; and severely damaged our food supply and our collective health.
Our grocery stores are ripe with industrially produced edible foodstuffs...frankenfoods created by a handful of profitable and powerful corporations. Just because you can chew, swallow, and perhaps even enjoy a certain "food" item does not make that item Food. And it certainly does not make it rich with the nutrients your body desperately needs to create and maintain health. On the contrary, those fake foods will cause numerous chronic illnesses.
For too long, the truth has been veiled from consumers. No one knew what they were eating, where the food came from, what corruptions were being perpetrated upon the food that is fundamentally meant to nourish and fuel us. A handful of powerful and wealthy corporations control and manipulate the food that we eat. These corporations put profit ahead of all other considerations; they have absolutely no regard, no respect for all the creatures involved in the web. The misery and illness fueled by the food industry merely profits the powerful medical industry. And the icing on this cake of corruption is that the regulatory agencies meant to protect us are run by and influenced for the corporations that profit from poisoning us.
Yet, we let them. So who is truly at fault? It’s time to lift the veil; it’s time to stop advancing the system with our financial support. It’s time to take back the control that belongs to each of us and is enacted by each of us with every choice we make. Do not participate in the system. Vote with your fork; educate yourself on getting well and living well; lose the lack of confidence that makes you easy prey for corporate fear-mongering. Don’t be a sucker for advertising. Don’t trust the government; don’t trust the mainstream media; don’t trust pharma and the doctors it breeds. This all requires effort and a shunning of ignorance. It is not a monumental feat. It is our human responsibility.
Your health starts from the ground up. Learn what this means and how conventional/synthetic farming practices destroy the soil that is meant to nourish us. If you want to be well, body and soul, avoid all industrial food...the pasteurized, processed, denuded, chemically poisoned, genetically corrupted, irradiated, disgustingly abused animals and plants, “foodstuffs” grown in dead, synthetic soil. Don’t assume that a USDA Organic label will save you. Government manipulation and greed-driven compromises abound in that industry, too.
Understand that there is little "truth" in labeling. The law allows hundreds of synthetics to hide within the “natural flavors” category; GMOs foods are not required to be identified; of the 84,000 commercial chemicals used in the U.S., nearly 20,000 of them are allowed to remain unidentified/unlabeled under “secrecy” rules. Some of these secret chemicals are used in children’s products...you and I do not and cannot know what they are and where they are.
But you must become an informed consumer. Read labels and learn what they mean and what they may be hiding. Become a student of food politics. Learn why corn and soy are destructive to our land, water, and our health. Study and understand the difference between truly organic real foods and everything else. Eschew packaged and processed foods. Eat simply...Learn to cook...Become familiar with traditional food preparation techniques that magnify nutrient density and improve digestibility. Acquaint yourself with how much raw produce you need daily and why. Buy properly cultivated fruits, vegetables, grains and animal products and learn how to prepare them for optimal nutrition and enjoyment. Eventually, you, too, as you peruse the store aisles, will routinely hear yourself saying, "That's not real food!"
In addition to providing life-giving and health-building nourishment, Real Food tastes so good! You may soon become a food snob of the highest order and be constantly gratified with the gourmet meals you can prepare and savor at home! You will likely become a connoisseur of ethnic foods and a student of flavor blending. Food is more than fuel...it is gustatory delight.
Take heart...the veil is slowly being lifted. We need to demand information and we need to act upon what we learn. What must we do? Eat REAL Food. Support the hard-working farmers who produce clean food. Don’t be blind to government collusion. Demand the truth and deny corporate profit-mongers what they want. The next generations will thank you.
