In the Beginning
An old saying that carries so much truth, but what does it really mean and why is it important?
Lets turn back the clock some thousands of years and the answer would be: I eat meat that I hunt and plants that I gather. I am a hunter-gatherer.
To be able to survive as a species, I need to be strong, healthy, agile and clever enough to outsmart my prey and enemies alike.
Growing Up
Roll on a couple of thousand years and now I call myself a settler or farmer. I eat meat from the animals I domesticated and plants that I harvest in cycles.
To be able to survive as a species I now need to be observant of my environmental conditions and expand my knowledge on the type of food to produce.
I also need to optimize their methods of production to assure quality and sustained capacity.
I also learned to produce more food than what is required for the nourishment of my clan or family.
I can now exchange the extra food for other items that may become valuable to me. This enables me to spend more time and energy on activities other than produce food for my clan today or tomorrow.
Today
The luxury of free time sparked the sharp increase in intellectual and organizational capacity of our species to the point where we are today where a very small percentage of our population actually spends their time hunting or producing food.
This culminated into a situation where in our days we have an almost endless list of food choices, good or bad. This situation has had both positive and negative effects.
The Choice is Yours
On the one hand you have the possibility to choose healthy, nourishing food that will keep your body functioning at its best possible levels, enabling you to effectively fulfill your role as modern Homo Sapiens sapiens.
The opposite is also true. This freedom of choice has unfortunately lead to a widespread production of products marketed under the banner of food but that provide little nourishment and worse.
We now produce some products that may cause allergies, disease and suffering to unsuspecting members of our species.
Here I refer to any so-called food that comes packaged in a box or packet and that is stuffed with heavily processed ingredients and chemicals like transgenic fats, artificial flavoring, coloring and preservatives.
In stead of replacing these unnatural food products with proper nourishment, our society chose to rather build and maintain a parallel industry that treats the symptoms from our bad eating habits, perpetuating the suffering of a big part of our modern day society.
Because our bodies do not naturally and efficiently process these artificial and low nourishment foodstuffs, we suffer more easily from conditions like obesity, diabetes, heart conditions, cancer and the like.
In our prehistoric days, we could live active productive lives without pharmaceuticals.
The only real difference between these 2 historical periods is the food we eat and level of physical activity we engage in.
To Summarize
Coming back to our topic of discussion, if we try to define our species of today by what we eat, the answer may be something like: Twenty first century Homo Sapiens sapiens is apparently intelligent but easily indoctrinated and physically mal-adapted to face the challenges of his world without the constant support from the medical/pharmaceutical industry.
Why don’t we sit back and reflect for a while on the immense importance that food has on our being and well-being.
It is our prime source of energy with sole purpose to fuel our physical bodies during every second of every day from our birth to the day we depart. Nothing more, nothing less.
So it really is not too pretentious to say:
You are what you eat.
