Is Your Food Your Poison Or Your Medicine?

While our food can be our medicine, it can also be our poison. The link between illness and western diets, high in animal fats and processed foods and low in fibre, is well documented. The more we move away from whole, unprocessed foods, the more likely we are to experience negative health effects.

A western diet is associated with metabolic syndrome, a precursor to diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and diverticular disease, a common gastrointestinal disorder.

Metabolic syndrome starts to show up anywhere people leave behind traditional diets heavy in local non-starchy vegetables and fruits, and start chowing down on processed foods and meat. Such a diet tends to be adopted in the newly minted middle class around the world as people have more money to spend. Processed foods, while often not being as healthy, usually cost more.

In a recent study in Brazil, a group of about 300 people had their diets analyzed by researchers. The study found three distinct diets.

1. Traditional diet - more common among older people
2. Western diet - more common among the more educated with higher incomes
3. Healthy diet - more common among the lowest income group 

Of the three diets, the western style diet, which contains sugary drinks and desserts, refined flour, increased saturated fat and processed foods, was the only one associated with symptoms of metabolic syndrome. We are becoming more aware of the health impacts of these alluring, tasty poisons.

Thankfully, you need look no further than your garden for the antidote. Compared to meat eaters, other studies have shown that vegetarians have as much as a 36% lower rate of metabolic syndrome, as well as a 33% reduction in diverticular disease.

It was the traditional and healthy diets in the Brazil study that fared the best when it came to avoiding the illnesses found in western diets. The traditional diet was based around whole foods like beans, rice, flour, and pasta.

The healthy diet group had the least disposable income, and were therefore the ones that gardened the most. As a result they were the least likely to develop metabolic syndrome, and had the best access to local, fresh, and organic produce.

There's your medicine.

No War Monday

You KNOW what war is good for - absolutely nothing
Infographic from: source

We talk a lot about the glory and honour of war, and the respect we should bestow upon those who wage it. But you don't hear much from our leaders about ending war. Why is this? Why wouldn't we want to eliminate the most grievously unsustainable activity performed by man (and I do mean man).

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported that global military spending was  $1.7 Trillion dollars in 2011. The good news, if you can call it that, is that the figure represented the first time in 13 years that spending didn't increase. 

Before you rejoice thinking that perhaps world leaders are on the road to realizing the error of their ways, a SIPRI researcher credited the leveling out of spending on "the global economic crisis, especially deficit-reduction measures in the USA and Europe". He went on to say that the decade-long rise in spending seemed to be over... at least for now.

When I hear we don't have enough money for clean drinking water, or housing, health care and education for all humans, I call bullshit. When people say we can't afford a social safety net, I call bullshit. Not enough money to develop sustainable energy? Wrong.

Why haven't we eliminated poverty yet? Not enough money? No. Just like all the other persistent problems, there is plenty of money, but there is not enough will to tackle them. It was a lack of will that caused the War on Poverty to be the shortest declared war in US history. In that war, as Ronald Regan said, "poverty won".

I know where we can tap into the cash to solve all of our problems, with some to spare for a planetary party when our work is done and we have achieved a sustainable world in which all people have enough.

Dream a little - what would you do for the planet with almost $2 Trillion bucks in the bank? As we stop war, we will turn the dream into reality.

How To Stop War

1. Teach kids basic philosophy and logic
2. Meditate
3. Stop glorifying violence
4. Make it illegal to profit from the killing industry
5. Make the bad men stop and go away - replace them with women 
6. Create a culture of compassion, cooperation and community
7. Be kind
8. Practice forgiveness
9. Be patient
10. Find peace with ourselves, then spread it around