Food Films

 

I recently viewed two documentaries concerning food: Food Matters and The Beautiful Truth.  Both focused on the overall benefits of eating whole foods and how highly processed foods are the main sources of all our aches, pains, disease and overall bad health.  I must say they make some very good, common sense, points. 

As much as I am committed to eating better and providing mostly healthy whole foods for my family’s meals, I am not sure I am yet willing to go to the extremes they recommend.  This may be foolish of me, but, honestly, I just cannot go there.  For example, The Beautiful Truth introduced me to the Gerson Method.  At first I thought, “Wow! Eating mostly organic whole foods can improve my health THAT much?”; but then they disclosed the importance of a coffee enema and well, that is just taking it a bit too far.  If I were like so many of their alleged patients who had only months to live, I might give it a shot.  What would I have to lose?  But, that isn’t my situation. I am interested in prevention, not cure.

The most interesting bit of information I came away with from both films is how the FDA, pharmaceutical companies and health industry as a whole  is motivated only by money.  There is no money in good health.  I am not saying, nor were the filmmakers I think, that our doctors do not want us to be healthy, but that they are trained in medicine not nutrition.  They prescribe us pills manufactured in a lab to treat the symptoms instead of directing us to beneficial vitamins and foods that will help our bodies heal themselves.

I will be 35 in February.  I have a family history of Type II Diabetes, heart disease and cancer.  So far I am completely healthy apart from fibromyalgia (which isn’t considered a disease per se and is not life threatening).  Personally, I would rather fuel my body with the foods that will help me remain healthy until I just die because my time here is done, not because I lacked the self-discipline to take care of my body.