I'm Surrounded By Soy!

POLLUTION


Have you noticed how unathletic and lacking in decisive presence, appearance and hardiness much of the young people of today are? I know it’s a popular subject to talk about how kids are getting fat and it’s all because of video games and cultural shifts, etc. There is a lot of truth to those things, but that’s not really what I’m talking about. It seems to me that the younger generation is manifesting the physical effects of chemical pollution in our food and environment.

As it comes to environmental issues I’m probably a middle of the road kind of guy meaning we absolutely should NOT be polluting, but at the same time there needs to be a balance between people, nature and industry. For every story of absolute environmental crime there are the same amount of stories of people who’ve been regulated out of business and livelihood over environmental lobby. I think we could have it both ways if we could all just sort of get along… you know what I mean?

But pollution in our food is a different matter. When you begin to add up depletion of soils, chemical preservatives and additives, pesticides, herbicides, genetic tampering with food, chemical alteration of existing foods, almost all of which is done in the name of profitability you get to a pretty scary situation. I think one of the most frightening things about this is how absolutely inundated we are with additives to our food that you don’t even notice. I see almost no other way to explain the effects on a significant number of our children. When you add up twelve to thirteen years of consistently being fed additives starting at baby formula and food right through convenience food and school lunches combined with inactivity it’s almost inevitable.

Jack LaLane said exercise is king and food is queen. I think many of the kids who don’t display physical effects of these foods are kids who are really active. Not even because of the calorie burning idea of activity, but because exercise itself creates such an efficiency in the body that it is protective from outside harmful factors. When you combine a lack of exercise with a lack of healthy food you are literally dooming them to a life of weakness.

I think another reason this has been so easy to pull on our society is that it’s kind of a sneaky process. Certainly there has been a societal trend towards foods that are not healthy. Cheetos for instance, never occur in nature and can in no way be simply processed from natural resources. However I think what’s really just coming around to the average public, certainly not the health and lifting conscious, but the average Joe, is that the food you generally consider natural and healthy are no longer that either.

People living in the area that I live in up until probably 40 years ago ate a very traditional Southern rural diet. That means lots of fat, lots of starch, and actually also a pretty good amount of protein considering they all produced their own meat. Yet they weren’t experiencing for the most part the health maladies that we associate with bad food. Diabetes, heart disease, etc., and many of them were living into their 80’s and 90’s. Why is that possible?

1. They were active their whole lives. Actually physically doing some work. Maybe not what we would consider exercise, but significant amounts of physical labor.

2. They were eating for a large part, foods processed as closely as possible to their natural state and without chemical additives. Mashed potatoes were made from real potatoes, not out of a box. Meat didn’t have fillers and hormone injections. Oils weren’t tampered with to make them cheaper and last longer. Vegetables actually had vitamins in them.

Even though many of these people might not be considered by the Hollywood standard thin and beautiful, they were vital and healthy. We need to move back to this type of nourishment for our children and ourselves. Everybody talks about this macronutrient or this micronutrient being either the killer or the cure for everything in existence. “Cut this out and you’ll lose weight,” “Add this and you’ll get healthy.” Much of it conflicting and utterly confusing.

Now I’m not a dietician, but one of the smartest things I ever read about nutrition was something that Bob Hoffman said. In paraphrase he said, “Strong and healthy people come from all parts of the world and eat the natural diets of those countries.” This means you can find basically every eating pattern and still find people that it produced health and strength in. From the Eskimos who lived almost exclusively off of fish, to the Hindus who are almost exclusively vegetarian and everywhere in between.

I think if you look at the common threads of most nutritional advice what you really get that causes the effect is the move toward natural food. The food that they recommend if you read closely is almost exclusively something that you have to cook from its natural state, not something that you can buy in a box that is heavily pre-treated with chemicals. Could it be that all the things that we consider natural foods are good for you? Regardless if it’s a carb or a fat or whatever? If it actually comes from its natural state, it might actually be good for you.

Learn to be careful about what you eat, because so many of things that you don’t even consider are absolutely inundated from one point or the other with some kind of unnatural tampering. Even 90% of what’s sold in health food stores in some way or other has something unnatural. Read every label.

I firmly believe much of the reason that I am as physically strong as I am is that as a child my parents grew much of the food that we ate. What we didn’t grow was as close to natural as possible. It wasn’t really a conscious thing they did, it was the generation that they came from and the area that we lived in, but it was a huge blessing for me none the less.

Let’s do as much as we can to help our children be healthy. I don’t mean acting psycho about your weight or putting six year olds on diets. I mean feed them natural food that you know the actual contents of. Help them develop a taste for real food. Buy at markets that allow you to get the foods as close to natural as possible. If Lord willing, some politician gets the guts to make food companies stop putting poisons in our food, let’s support them.