A Health Rebel Speaks

A HEALTH REBEL SPEAKS

Why maintain good health? It’s just too difficult to change our present diet. Our bodies are used to a lot of rice or a high-carb diet, fatty foods, steak, chicken and pork. Please skip the vegetables. They’re really yucky! Don’t forget my favorite chocolates and junk foods.

Then, of course, for some, meals won’t be complete without some alcoholic beverage. Finish each meal, without those colorful sugar and butter pastries with soft drinks and coffee. I shouldn’t control myself. I’ve worked so hard. I deserve every possible break I want, especially these Holidays.

Cigarettes are one of the most wonderful habits we can cultivate. A puff here will certainly soothe and calm those nerves and relieve you of the pressures of life. For me this is life.

Many think this way in many parts of the world. But what exactly are they doing to their bodies when they carry on with such habits? Disease in a very broad spectrum would be a common answer. What really happens to the body?

People are finding it difficult to make that shift from refined sugar to the raw or muscovado kind or honey. Keeping refined sugar in our system means we supply or bodies with “empty calories” i.e. no nutrient value, only energy. Our body goes to a roller coaster effect making us hungrier even we’ve just eaten.

What exactly happens is our blood sugar level - soars up, signaling our pancreas to work and secrete insulin. Then the blood level rapidly plunges, making us feel wiped-out, hungry and depressed. Refined sugar doesn’t just give you “empty” calories or zero nutrients, it robs your body of nutrients by using the vitamins and minerals so it can be digested and absorbed.

Meat-how could this be stricken off my diet? Many nutritionists have oft to compromise with the uncontrollable taste buds of many. They say that you can eat chicken without the skin on or the steak or pork without the fat, just the lean meat. I’ve even heard one local doctor advice his patient who has a heart problem not to refrain from eating meat, just the lean part. Your guess is as good as mine; she’s already tucked six-feet under the ground, resting forever from her heart problems.

Those excess saturated fats from the meat make too much cholesterol building a formidable in the arteries. Have you ever seen a by-pass operation? Have you seen how the heart or certain arteries have this long solidified fat clogging the blood stream? When the surgeons have pulled it out, it really look like a yellowish long churro except that this time it isn’t delightful seeing it because, you are aware how much a person has suffered due to the clog up.

Of those mouth watering desserts, you’d give all codes of good health just for it. Just as some would say indulging in this will not harm you. Now, take a look what’s in it. Most of the ingredients are refined; meaning a diet high in refined starches is a decrease in the consumption of fiber. Without fiber, food can take up to 70-80 hours to pass through the digestive tract. Lack of fiber in your diet is responsible for your sluggish bowels - constipation, if it does not graduate to diverticulosis or cancer of the colon.

Those salty foods just perk up my appetite. Of course, salt is a very easy cultivated habit. Bland food is just difficult to swallow. Salt brings out the flavor in food. Although having excess salt in one’s system is implicated with high blood pressure and arthritis as well. But those chemists certainly did a good job inventing those food additives which make any food look really appealing and enhancing their flavor and making them last longer. Did you also know that there are 3,000 food additives and their number is decreasing each year as researches confirm their toxicity? Or how certain additives are carcinogenic or have decalcified the bones or have cause hyperactivity in children?

Anyway, rest assured, if this calm you down, that what most manufacturers are using are the “permitted’ list. Not over looking the fact that the long term effects of which are not yet established.

Choco-chums, brewed coffee and soft drinks where would civilization be without them! People will ditch out their last cent for the taste of these. Hold that a second! Coffee and caffeine-rich food produce a release of the body’s stored sugar to combat the influx of what is essentially poison. Your cholesterol level goes up and the B Vitamins are depleted. Hypertension and nervousness is provoked and other breast or prostrate problems.

Moderate drinking is what is needed. An old friend trained his son to drink shandy at the age of three. The boy loves it and he’s appetite increase. The picture of those hard-working men who’d just want to “condition” their system with some alcohol is my kind of man.

The myth of moderate drinking has long been believed and accepted. Such social drinking can escalate into a dangerous, self-destructive habit. Look beneath our system, the irreversible damage of the nerve cells happens. You don’t notice how the brain cells and your nerve cells are being decreased each time you pour alcohol in your system. You’ve seen how alcohol consumes and burns up, that’s what it literally does to your body. B Vitamins, C and minerals like, zinc, magnesium, potassium are depleted rendering the susceptible to many health hazards. You can be plagued with a variety of burdens from nervous systems problems, sexual impotence, gastric troubles, heart disease to liver cirrhosis.

That walking chimney or a dragon puffing out smoke image does not seem to faze me at all. In fact, smoking gives me the satisfaction and relieves me of stress. The “Warning of the Surgeon General” in ads does not scare me a bit. Sad to say but you’re slowly killing your loved ones with that smoke coming from you, besides the tar deposits in your lungs which could give you chronic bronchitis, emphysema, coronary heart disease and even lung cancer.

Consider all damages your stubborn habits could give you. You would just end up to be a rebel without a cause! What a waste.

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