HEALTH CARE SUMMIT
The power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the
best bits of life. ~Jamie Oliver, accepting 2010 TED Award
HEALTH IS BODILY WEALTH
What do people say when disaster strikes? At least you have your health. Being in good health is of such fundamental importance that, no matter what else occurs, we can get through it as long as we have our health. Our survival is assured.
That, sadly, is changing for Americans because most of us are no longer healthy, and we have been passing this new paradigm on to our children for two generations. Neither the government nor health insurance is a viable solution to poor eating which is responsible for substantial health care costs and preventable deaths. Eating whole food will increase your health rather than rob you of it.
OBSTACLES TO HEALTH
What’s wrong with packaged food? It contains sugars, salt and chemical additives – artificial nutrients and flavorings, preservatives, stabilizers – not to mention packaging to break the planet’s back. We don’t need that stuff, it isn’t really food and it isn’t good enough to eat.
Red meat.  Limit – not eliminate — but relegate it to a smaller percentage of total food eaten. Incidents of acquired diseases and unhealthy body conditions will plummet. Just give up a little meat. It’s worth a try.
Since cancer research began in earnest in the middle of the past century, generations of scientists and medical researches have worked to find a cure. Have you eve wondered why it is with us still? Our eating habits are getting worse, not better, and developing nations that move towards American eating habits have a dramatic rise in Western diseases and conditions: cancer, heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure.
Antioxidants, prominent and plentiful in fresh fruits and vegetables, are nature’s best defense against cancer. But because we’re eating fewer fruits and vegetables, cancer cells are winning, killing us prematurely. Absent change, we don’t stand a chance.
SO WHERE DO WE START?
The good news is that it’s easier than you think.  Cook, engaging your family in the process. Reading this website is a good first start. Begin buying real food and see health improve in substantial and dramatic ways; you will be able to feel the difference and it will amaze you. If everyone starts today, we will begin to see collective progress within the year. If we keep at it, the obesity epidemic will be stunted, costs for treating preventable disease minimized, and our children will have a better chance at longer lives.
- Eat whole foods: fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, beans, dairy and meat with little or no additives. Begin and end every day with fresh fruit.
- Look at ingredients:Â if a fifth grader can’t pronounce it, don’t buy it. Â Avoid food with added salt (sodium) and sugar (fructose, dextrose).
- Shop the perimeter of the grocery store. Avoid the center aisles because that’s where most of the artificial things are shelved.
By just doing these three things, you’ll save money, eat better and generate less garbage to throw away.
IDEAS WORTH SPREADING
- Stay informed. This twenty-minute video should be seen by every man, woman and child who eats. It’s Jamie Oliver’s TED Award Speech, among other things, showing elementary school children unable to identify everyday produce (tomato, potato).
- For more good information, go to this site, the first of an eight-part series showing the consequences of a lifetime of eating poorly.
- Individual effort can make a difference. If everyone learns to cook, and teaches three other people to cook, that only needs to repeat itself 25 times to reach everyone in America. ~Jamie Oliver
- Vote with your fork, refusing to buy Big Food’s synthetic products. Subtracting exports, the US produces twice as much food as we eat. Manufacturers want people to always eat more today than yesterday to benefit their shareholders’ bottom line. This is a food Ponzi scheme, and as unsustainable as it is ridiculous. Their marketing, however, will stop at nothing to realize this goal.
- Of all the fatalities in the US, over half of them are caused by what we feed ourselves. Death has become a self-inflicted consequence of poor eating:Â our choice to eat things laden with sugar, salt, fat, chemicals, preservatives, and artificial additives.
Today’s preparation is Teriyake Sauce. I’ve already given a preparation for Teriyake Chicken, but it occurs to me that a separate formula just for Teriyake Sauce is in order, especially since that is something that one might be tempted by buy at the grocery store, which has about 320 mg of salt in every tablespoon. Make something with Teriyake Sauce, and add just the salt you need. If you’re baking chicken, you won’t need any additional salt because of the salt the manufacturer pumps into the meaty parts. If you’re making chicken wings, you will need to add a dash of salt. But no one needs 320 mg of salt; it’s downright dangerous.
