I'm writing an eBook.
ON THIS BLOG, it can only be about the same thing - bad health and how to avoid it. I'm intending the book to be a guide to healthy living, at whatever level of commitment you can afford. Though I suppose the question really should be, how bad a level of health will you tolerate? Because there's always a come-back.
It's a sad fact that most people don't look too far into the future when they're making decisions about their health. They never have, if my research into diet in the past is accurate. How did things get this way?
Mediaeval peasants growing their own food, and with the luxury of choosing what to grow, chose in two ways: what their neighbours did - who wants to be different? - and what gave most food weight for the effort and acreage. And in general, it worked: experience had weeded out the worst choices even though more vegetables would have been healthier. But most farmers, then as now, had no clear idea of why typical local choices were best (and they usually were). It was the farsighted few who experimented. Even today, it's hard to bring new methods to individual peasant farmers, though whole villages are easier to convince with some evidence.
Nineteenth century European well-waged factory workers chose their diet from local custom - who wants to be different? - and according to their income, but they always aspired to the food of their 'betters'. In consequence, if they got wealthier, their food got less nutritious - it had more of the key nutrition factors refined out, just as the food of the rich did. But the rich ate a very varied diet, which gave them some compensation.
As mechanisation made food cheaper relative to wages, food for workers got steadily less nutritious. By the mid twentieth century, most people ate refined food - the food of the rich a century earlier - and food manufacturers got skilled at supplying the 'luxuries' at lower and lower cost, so that they gradually took over as the mainstay of the Western diet. Advertising emphasised those foods that gave their makers maximum profit and persuaded people that these were the norm, not traditional foods. And who wants to be different? So nutrition has got increasingly poor as the West has become richer than ever before.
Now, the typical Western diet comprises a majority of refined, addictive, sugar-and-salt rich 'luxury' foods, chosen from a huge range of heavily advertised items of the kind that were once occasional, 'naughty' treats. Nutrition is less considered than ever and the main digression from this bingeing is weight-loss dieting.
Surveys over the years in the UK and USA have charted these changes. And health bodies in all Western countries are very worried at the coming implications to public health and national budgets that will have to be spent treating the self-induced diseases of an overweight, constipated, dehydrated, atherosclerosed, diabetic, arthritic, cancer-riddled population. Who are nevertheless likely to survive - crippled - long enough to need expensive geriatric care, too. And blame the government for not keeping them healthy.
Am I piling this manure on too deep? I don't think so. I think this describes a bare to large majority of the population in all Western countries (including Japan). And it all comes from the human habit of keeping to a short-term view of diet.
Are you going to join this diseased mass? Or will you make your own choice to put your body's health first? It's not hard; it just requires the minimum of self discipline and the knowledge of what to do.
Good diet is compatible with any major culture's food patterns and it doesn't even stop you eating out in company - the bane of anyone on a crank diet. And a good diet will automatically keep your weight at optimum, reducing fat or adding it for health. Oh, and correct exercise is an essential part: not too little, not too much and the right, pleasurable kind.
When the Bad Health Diet comes out, get it. It'll change your life and you'll wish you'd found it years ago. Until then, this blog is full of tips and hints and some of the background to the Diet. You could read the latest, dip in anywhere or - best of all - start at the beginning in early February (choose from the Calendar on the right).
Good health!
