I was making a fire today, using up some old newspaper to start it. As I crinkled the paper, my eyes fell on an article describing a Brooklyn couple, who found out, within one week, that both the man and the woman have advanced cancer. For her it was breast, and for him, colon. They are young, in their 30’s and have a little girl to take care of. We hear cases like these too often: young people with serious or even life threatening conditions (although this case is unusual in that both were hit at the same time), and I don’t think we should just accept this as normal, and attribute it to bad luck.

Last week I was in at a doctor’s office for a yearly wellness exam; I looked around me in the sitting room, and everyone but one person was obese and looked unwell. The phrase “obese and malnourished” came to mind.

I am convinced that the food we eat is making us sick; I am also convinced that the food we eat can be a critical step towards our well-being. As you know, I have been deeply involved studying and practicing farming and nutrition over the past years, and I need to say this: Before you take medication for whatever’s bothering you, look at the food you eat. The food most people eat is dead, degenerated, irradiated, synthetic food that’s making them sick. If anyone finds themselves not well, I want to beg them to look at their diet, as a means of getting well again. Maybe not only diet, maybe you have to do medications too depending on what’s going on, but at least make diet as important a part of your journey to getting better as the medication. Eventually, maybe you can even ditch the medication and stay well and radiant through good diet and life habits alone.

It’s been said so many times, but it’s true, so I say it again. We need to really acknowledge the fact that we can pay to get good quality, nutritious food, or we can pay the hospital and the pharmaceutical industry. But to expect to be healthy and well while eating the cheap, degenerated food that we’ve been eating, is almost to expect a miracle.

Since I know a little bit of how food is grown, and what goes into food production, I am very critical when it comes to the food I buy for my family. I pretty much stay away from all processed foods, because that’s where you get all kinds of preservatives and nasty additives that we should not be ingesting. I try to buy food that’s as close to its natural state as possible. Like buying a real apple instead of apple-flavored whatever. And I try to cook starting with raw ingredients, like real vegetables, instead of pre-processed ones, such as purchased soup bases, or boullion cubes.

When I buy milk for my family, I get raw milk, because I know the guy the milk comes from and I trust his practices. If I were to buy yogurt (I don’t bc my sister makes it for us), I’d check the label and buy the one that has the fewest ingredients, just plain whole organic yogurt, made from RBGH free milk with beneficial bacterial cultures. And so on. I am constantly scanning our grocery list to see what we can do better on. Like, instead of buying granola, why not make our own, and that way we know for sure what goes into it. I want to minimize what we buy and maximize what we grow ourselves, but I realize that this is not feasible for most people. So in that case, it’s back to doing the research and finding sources that you trust, like a farmer near you, or a health food store that carries products with integrity. The point is that when you start going down the path of really questioning and acting on the knowledge that what you eat is absolutely critical to your health, to how you feel, how you look, and so on, then things start to change and new avenues will open up that you may not know about right now.

Peace