The X-Factor: It's The Food Stupid! (Wed. Aug. 23, 2017)

“They say you are what you eat, so I strive to be healthy. My goal in life is not to be rich or wealthy. Cause true wealth comes from good health and wise ways. We got to start taking better care of ourselves...” – From the song ‘Be Healthy’ by Dead Prez.

As much as we in our typical arrogance claim to know, the human body largely remains a mystery to scientists, a real life still being charted territory. So, while we’re understandably fascinated with what’s in the cosmos, or what we refer to as outer space, as Monday’s solar eclipse underscores, we’re still in discovery mode with regards to our inner space. Why are some of us born with certain medical conditions? How exactly does one prolong the quality and length of life? And how do our bodies actually respond at a cellular level to ingesting certain foods and medicines? Anyone born in Jamaica circa the 1970s and 80s can attest to the period I call BPF, or Before Processed Foods. Then, pretty much everything we ate (barring certain canned foods) came from the ground, and the only fast food joint of note was KFC; and that was a rare treat not a meal staple as it and other franchises now are. Our medicine was bush tea and natural foods. We got our annual de-worming and post-summer washout and doctor’s visits were rare.

Living to Eat

Nowadays, the assault on our senses is relentless. Buy this, eat that…fast, cheap, literally at your fingertips. The perception of convenience has taken over our daily existence at the expense of our bank accounts and bodies. The rationale that we’re all too busy to shop local and eat right, especially given the emergence of women in the middle and upper tiers of the working world may on the surface seem valid, but really it’s not. A career woman who happens to be married with children cannot reasonably be expected to also be a full-time homemaker, hence she is not the scapegoat. Regardless of our situation, it really comes down to one thing; priorities. If like the things we chase and covet, home, car, prestige we assigned full importance to our health and by extension how and with what we fuel our bodies, then seeking out the ingredients and nourishing our minds and bodies would take primacy. But it doesn’t. So, what do we do? We eat ‘food’ made from mostly imported sources over which we have no control or oversight, then we complain about our health and hit the gym to remedy a self-made problem. Human logic at its best. As a marketing practitioner, I get it. We all want to Have It Our Way, Live For The Moment and satisfying our cravings is well, A Big Deal, but that’s really the lazy way out. It takes discipline and commitment to see much less treat our bodies like the temples they are. Guilty as charged your honour. But this is not a typical rant about what not to eat. No, like everything else the things we like should be enjoyed, in moderation though, and some of them rarely, if at all. Controlling our body weight and state was always at least 50% about our diets, not our physical activity level. Beyond that, literally many of the processed foods (and in many cases these are literally made from a process that excludes actual meat) that we’re eating is the root cause of most of our lifestyle diseases.  

Eating to Live

What if you discovered that the companies that control the supply of your food also have high stakes investment in the pharmaceutical industry? What’s the connection? Well, in much the same way curing many illnesses is neither a good strategic plan or ideal for a sustainable business model, unhealthy humans are great for business. Have you seen the viral video of ‘beef’ being made from human excrement? I’m sure many of us have been sent countless videos about fake rice, cornmeal, chicken…you name it, it’s being manufactured and sold often with even a trace of the product itself. Welcome to the new world order, where food is THE weapon of mass destruction. Gone are the days of world wars and while USA and North Korea play war games, we’re dying by the millions annually from what we eat. Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) is a cool sounding name for lab-engineered foods altered from their natural state to enable shorter growth periods and more resistant strains against pests and weather conditions. Monsanto is now the largest developer and producer of genetically modified seeds for crops including wheat, controlling at least 25% of the world market. The company is also a biotech firm, manufacturers of RoundUp, a herbicide which coincidentally only its patented GM seeds are resistant to. See where this is going? Don’t worry, they’re now into milk production. Have you ever researched how milk is made? Not the farm hand part we see when it’s being expressed from the cow’s breast, I mean what milk itself consists of and what has to happen for it to be produced. That’s for another day, not milking it. Factoid: Six chemical companies control the global seed, pesticide and agricultural biotechnology markets. The point is, between GMO’s, rotten corned beef from Brazil and all the Chinese meat reinventions and additives, considering we’re an importing country, much of what we put on our tables is literally poisoning our bodies. There’s a reason we’re far more prone to maladies like diabetes, various cancers and early onset strokes and heart diseases, especially as people of colour. Many of the foods we get at ‘bargain prices’ are dumped onto the open market and could never even pass the borders of most European or North American countries. I heard a BBC report recently about the same brand of meat having different quality and content for different European countries. Same packaging and labelling, different standard. Imagine what gets exported to so-called Third World countries.

Let Your Food Be Your Medicine

Ole time people were on to something. They ‘knew’ instinctively that the food had almost everything we need to sustain a healthy and long life. Even if they weren’t knowledgeable about the active ingredients and scientific terminologies, they knew what different fruits, herbs and natural remedies did to and for the body and mind. We sacrifice our health by choosing to make earning a living the most important item on our checklist at our expense, by skipping meals and hustling to eat crappy ones because we don’t have enough time. The irony is, when the effects start taking root we scurry to the doctor to address the very same problems we created. God bless physicians, nurses and generally progressive medical and scientific practitioners, but we did just fine back in the day by being mindful about what we put inside our mouths and onto our bodies. If we cared to, in this Google era, we could without much effort find out how simple lifestyle changes can dramatically positively affect our quality of life. These hormones and GMOs, pesticides and experimental superfoods are actually killing us, and making us obese, disease-prone and generally unhealthy along the way. So, what’s the solution? Know your food, not just your pork. Learn about what nature has in its pharmacy. But mostly, it comes down to being deliberate about what, when and how we eat. If you’re into meats, you must recognize what comes with consuming another animal’s flesh and byproducts. And just because something looks and tastes good doesn’t mean that it’s good for you. Type ‘what our food is doing to us’ in Google and see for yourself. B+ Email comments to [email protected]