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Processed food: remedy or poison?
Back in the days of Hippocrates (circa 300 BC) when the assertion was recorded “let food be your medicine and medicine your food” he was not thinking in terms of what would happen to food two thousand years later. Be assured he would be horrified; the shock would probably be the premature end of him!The Times newspaper in London (April 9, 2008) reported in a story the case of 400 children from the breakaway fundamentalist Mormon Church in Texas, America, who had not been exposed to ‘the outside world.’ This article is not to do with the morality or other issues of the story. It is to do with the children brought up in a traditional environment and the consequences of meeting as it is called ‘the outside world’. One of the volunteer carers of the children said: “They know nothing of the outside world. The children and their mothers did not know what to do with crayons. Our food makes them sick, because they are not used to processed food.”
And herein lays the truth of many a child and adult’s ills: processed food. Processed food is poisonous to a healthy organism; that is why healthy children and adults naturally shun packaged and processed foods, preferring to eat whole and natural foods freshly prepared. Processed foods with the additives of taste enhancers, colourings and preservatives, the sugar to sweeten, and more, are poisonous to the body – but a little bit at a time the body becomes used to the toxins.
In selecting foods we have moved far away from the natural order of living. We have lost the ability to use our senses and inner instincts for selecting food that supports and enhances the living beings that we are. Regrettably, processed foods have become the norm for most Western people. Therefore, in re-establishing a proper dietary pattern which support the dynamics of the unfolding human being for infant to creative adult, there are basic questions to ask – is it natural or unnatural? Is the food alive or is it dead? And is it suitable for the infant or child?
Additionally, one must ask the question, despite all the modern contrivances and conveniences: what did my grandmother and her mother before her, feed her children and her family? This then removes many of the doubts and baffling science from the selection processes. Grand- and great-grand parents lived well, and healthily, before the advent of food processing.
To return to health and well-being, the path can be long and arduous, but it must always start with diet – simple, whole and natural foods. This is the remedy, first and foremost.
Best wishes
Cornelis
© Cornelis van Dalen 2008
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