It’s easy to see the vast number of lifestyle ailments that plague people today. In fact, you can’t escape the evidence! Supermarket and drug store aisles are full of pills, creams and syrups! Magazines shout from cover to cover about ways to be thinner, healthier, happier, and live longer. New drugs are advertised on television constantly (along with their long warning lists of dangerous side effects and serious problems, even death).
Have you ever wondered why people need all of these things more today than ever before? Has it ever occurred to the consumer that they have brought many of these problems on themselves? To some, that is beginning to sink in.
Mom Was Right
Eat your fruits and vegetables. We all heard it preached at every meal. So where did we go wrong? We gave in to lifestyle choices: fast food, prepared frozen meals, all-you-can-eat buffets, quick, cheap, and easy. But healthy?
Maybe we could stand to learn something from this wry historical account:
2000 B.C. – Here, eat this root.
1000 A.D. – That root is heathen. Here, say this prayer.
1850 A.D. – That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.
1940 A.D. – That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.
1985 A.D. – That pill is ineffective. Here, take this antibiotic.
2000 A.D. – That antibiotic is unhealthy. Here, eat this root.
(Author unknown but saluted!)
Our Diets - Our Illnesses
Our diets are especially lacking in the lesser-known fruits, those that are richly pigmented and packed with nutrients. And it is making us sick.
It is actually quite amazing to see that heart disease, high blood pressure, joint problems, chronic pain and more are so rampant today when simple lifestyle changes can allow one to reduce weight, get off medications, lower blood pressure, and reduce risks of suffering from such lifestyle ailments.
We have become our own worst enemies. While we all struggle to live longer, the years we add to our lives could be unhealthy and painful. Perhaps we would be well advised to nourish, protect and preserve our bodies and our health!
Going Back to Move Forward
Before we praised the ease of fast food or wallowed in the convenience of frozen-prepared meals, people ate proper and wholesome food. Thanks to a growing grass roots movement, powered by the Internet and the tens of millions of Baby Boomers in the world, people are beginning to realize that food might truly be the answer for sustaining and restoring health.
Mainstream media has even taken hold and helped propel this movement toward controlling our health.
Articles toting the popularity of a nutrition-packed fruit began appearing on the pages of such well-known and respected press as The Times, UK, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the widely read magazine, Vogue as early as 2003.
In late 2004, Oprah Winfrey introduced her millions of viewers to a man and his book that would cause a wave of superfoods and nutritional beverages to sweep across the country. That man is Dr. Nicholas Perricone and his book is The Perricone Promise: Look Younger – Live Longer in Three Easy Steps.
Dr. Perricone revealed his list of the Ten Super Foods to Rejuvenate the Body, and on that list he included ONLY ONE FRUIT – calling it one of the most nutritious and powerful foods in the world!
In that same year, Matt Lauer of NBC Today hosted a road show from the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. He was reporting on a fruit that became dubbed “the Viagra of the Amazon”.
This small, deep purple, nutritious and powerful fruit grows at the top of the sky-high palm trees in the rainforests of Brazil.
That fruit is the Acai. There is no other fruit like it.
Yet the shelves are stocked with innumerable single-fruit juices all promising health benefits that cannot come close to those of this amazing fruit.
Making Progress Toward Better Health
Consider these words, spoken by the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, around 400 B.C.: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”. Healthy food can mean a healthy body. Many medicines have been created to treat the symptoms that have arisen because we do not eat the proper foods! But we must understand that we have the control. We can prevent so much pain if we pay attention and listen to our bodies.
But getting people to return to healthy eating has not been an easy road. Trends of the past decades show a very slow march toward where we are today. Before 1970 health concerns were all about correcting malnutrition and infections. The decade of the 1970’s was one of vitamins and minerals and cardiovascular disease. The 1980’s brought the decade of anti-oxidants. In the 1990’s we turned to herbs and genes. Now, here we are in the 2000’s, the dawn of the age of phytonutrients and inflammation.
We have a chance to take control, and to improve our nutrition, health, vitality and overall well being. This time, we can’t afford to miss it.
