Our Health
“And the Lord shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers to give thee.” (Deut. 28:11).
I believe that our health is in serious jeopardy today. We are now looking at a time when the next generation will not live longer than their parents generation. The current generation is being raised on a diet that has little or no real food value. What hope is there for their bodies to grow and develop properly? According to an article in “News from the British Columbia Naturopathic Association, Your Health Vol. 11/NO. 3/ Summer 2005”, eight researchers from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition conducted a study on the overall Western diet to see how it related to disease and death. They found that there were seven fundamental changes in our diet during the Neolithic and Industrial periods. The following information taken from “Your Health” was shown in their research. They are 1. A huge increase in milk consumption (after weaning). Humans are the only species which consumes another’s milk. 2. An increase in cereal consumption. “Nearly 85% of the cereals consumed today are from highly processed refined grains bearing no relation to the cereals consumed prior to the Industrial Revolution.” 3. The consumption of refined sugars, due largely to food processing. 4. Refined vegetable oil consumption has risen. While oil extraction is an ancient art, the use of new purification procedures and manufacturing techniques, such as hydrogenation, developed in 1897, have led to a huge consumption of trans-fatty acids. 5. The use of and consumption of salt has risen dramatically – 90% of the salt in our diets comes from salt added to our food, not naturally occurring in our food. Two other examples were fatty domestic meats and alcohol.
We are living in a world where so much of our food is processed that we do not really know what we are eating. We are also consuming high quantities of preservatives and pesticides. Our children are not getting the proper nutrients from the food and their immune systems are not able to deal with the toxins that are in the food and air. We are raising a large number of children who are depressed, obese, hyper active or lethargic, and who will have a short life span.
Keeping our bodies healthy is important and we must try to be aware of what we are eating. We must be aware of the information that we are given and definitely read product labels. We must develop an attitude of keeping healthy rather than, “well if I get sick the doctor can fix me.” Today’s break-through drug may be tomorrow’s disappointment. Our bodies are wonderfully created by God. It is amazing how they can heal themselves given the right environment.
We seem to spend more time and money today on deciding “how to decorate our house” or “where should we go on vacation” than we do on keeping our good health. I guess too many of us take our good health for granted until something goes wrong.
Our bodies have many things to overcome in today’s culture to keep them healthy. We have poor food quality, food additives, genetically modified foods, processed foods, pesticides, pollution, stress on our bodies, etc. As our population grows and we seek housing we are expanding further and further into our farmland. It seems to me that this will eventually cause a further famine of good quality healthy food as our farmers struggle to survive. Where will we get our food? Our diet plays a huge part in our health and if we cannot get good quality food we will suffer.
We are also seeing prescription drugs being advertised more and more. Whenever I see one of these ads it always appears as if the side affects are worse than the original problem. These prescription drugs are only dealing with the symptom and not the problem. What other health problems are they causing? We must not be used as guinea pigs by the large pharmaceutical industry. The only answer is a diet of simple foods according to God’s food laws. Let us help our body to heal itself with God’s help.
“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” (Gen.1:29).
