Traditional and Alternative medicine.

Sunday, October 29. 2006

Balanced diet for good health

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Balanced diet for good health

Food is the basic need par excellence. You are what you eat and, without food, you simply cant be! Food is the common denominator for all living things. It plays a significant role in all aspects of human life be it physical, psychological, spiritual or social to mention but a few.

Hunger is kin to anger. You simply can’t be happy when your tummy is empty. Yet, if you want to bet on good health, you should target more on a balanced diet made of carbohydrates, proteins, fibres, vitamins and minerals than merely try to satisfy your urge for food.

Health is wealth indeed but the contrary is not necessarily true. While a balanced diet is often denied to poor people, some wealthy ones are either greedy or fall victim to anorexia. You have to eat the right things, in the right portions at the right time. Food, as in everything in life driven by reason, is preferable to being pulled by passion, fashion or addiction.

As food is intimately linked to life, it is considered as a gift of God. Therefore it should be treated as such. All religious philosophies have numerous customs, beliefs and rituals which involve food. For instance, during the Eucharist, Christians commemorate the last supper of Christ while most religions have fasting periods like the Ramadan for Muslims.

Families who pray and eat together stay together. The undisciplined way in which we eat in our families – each member consuming what he wants at the time of his choice, might well be the mirror image of the sometimes chaotic society in which we are living.

Our lack of mutual understanding and conviviality might well originate from the fact that we have lost touch with the happy table, which, in remote times would be equivalent to the bonfire where everyone would provide security and warmth to each other around food. Our forefathers have learnt from necessity than none of them was as strong as all of them, feeding time was a most privileged moment to bring everyone together in order to ensure good morale in the group and it did work!!!

The unequal distribution of food on the planet is one of the most unfortunate contradictions, which highlights the profound shortcomings of humanity, its egoism. While great progress has been made in producing and stocking food, 850 million people suffer from chronic malnourishment and billions are affected by malnutrition around the world, even in industrialized countries.

Moreover, instead of sharing and helping each other, foreign aid to agriculture and farming has fallen from 9 billion dollars to 5 billion dollars in the last decade!

On a lower scale, people who can afford it make great waste of food. I now understand why I was taught not to leave food on my plate when I was little; it is a blunder against the have-nots.
Empty tummy is equal to empty economy. Poverty should be made history if we want people to eat properly. If we want the world’s economy to be healthy, people should be able to eat properly. This is a basic equation which calls for more democracy in global nutrition, food distribution with a human face, that of sharing and understanding. It is no coincidence that Food day precedes the day when we all think about how to fight poverty…

ALAIN JEANNOT
Posted by Wit`Alis at 11:30 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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