The apple is for the body

CEBU, Philippines - First of all, we must come to terms with hypocrisy. Let us stop thinking that feeding ourselves, necessarily mitigates hunger. Let us stop thinking that by eating, we are full. What you are eating may not necessarily be what you need. What you take in may not necessarily be what gives you nourishment.

In the aftermath of the New York dinner scandals, President Arroyo created anti-hunger task forces by way of cushioning serious reputation management and public relations flak. In fairness, it was also meant to mitigate the serious hunger problem in the Philippines after it was found that the country is categorized as “serious” and ranked as 34th among 84 countries in the Global Hunger Index based on a report that the International Food Policy Research Institute prepared this year.

The Philippines scored 13.2 in the index which is still considered “serious.” A country is classified as having a “serious” hunger problem if it has a score of 10 to 19.9.

The hunger index score is based on the various available data including the proportion of undernourished in the population, prevalence of underweight in children under five years, and under-five mortality rate. In the Philippines, around 16 percent of the population in 2003 to 2005 was undernourished, about 20.7 percent of children were underweight in 2002 to 2007, and the under-five mortality rate was at 2.8 percent in 2007.

Policy responses of countries to food security and hunger mitigation can impact at different levels. The odd thing here is that unknown to many of us, the president has since created anti-hunger task forces in 2006 through a directive called executive order 616 or the creation of the Anti-Hunger Task Force. It did not seem to have the exposure it needed until the New York dinner scandals.

What many of us may not be aware of is that even if we mitigate hunger, we may have compromised nutrition. Although the anti-hunger program of the government is a three-pronged continuum of food production, nutrition and healthy lifestyles, still it is the nutrition component that has become a more serious concern than hunger itself.

Nutritional Disease.

Studies on alternative medicine over the past decade have conclusively proven that cancer is a nutritional disease. Sir Arbuthnot Lane in speaking before the House of Commons declared that cancer is a disease of civilization. The more sophisticated a civilization is in food preparation, the more cancer became prevalent. He went on to say that there is no such thing as cancer among those leading primitive lives – meaning those whose food preparation have least to do with heating and processing. Among those who feed themselves on “the white man’s diet” like fastfood, canned food, junk food or heavy-meat filled food were the most likely candidates to be afflicted with cancer.

In the end, cancer is no mystery disease that needs expensive research or that needs to be discovered under the microscope, laboratories, test tubes or in tormenting animals. The cure for cancer is found on the dinner plate. The food we eat is a lifetime and lifestyle decision if you don’t want to get entangled in dreaded diseases. As Dr. Johanna Budwig would put it, the harm done by eating the wrong kind of food fats has serious repercussions in all realms of life including healthy mental and spiritual functioning. Eat the wrong kind of food, and everything else goes haywire in your life.

Your Body, Your Healer.

Food by itself has no healing or nourishing power. It is the innate and intelligent functions of your body that does the healing and nourishing. As Paul Nison in “The Raw Life: Becoming Natural in an Unnatural World” would say it, raw food and the proper environment gives the body the raw materials it needs to detoxify, create energy and rebuild. The body knows how to heal, nourish and rebuild itself. But if you feed it with the wrong food, it reacts and you get sick. Over time, the healing, cleaning and nourishing functions of the body break down and cancer cells wreak havoc.

So what’s the best diet? Raw food like fruits and vegetables is the ideal. The problem with eating canned food or artificially processed food is that the living cells of the body do not take nourishment from dead and artificial ingredients in cooked food. So after taking a typical meal of cooked food, a person thinks his stomach is full or that he has satisfied his nutritional needs or that his hunger is mitigated. But in reality, cooked food starves the body’s cells. While the hunger maybe mitigated, it compromised the nutritional component for the body to rebuild, nourish and heal itself.

Instead of eating meat whether pork, beef, chicken or fish, substitute these with nuts – peanuts, almonds, cashew nuts, you can have citrus fruit juices for the morning meals, raw vegetables for noon meals and then fruits and slightly cooked vegetables for evening meals. Sugars should be taken from fruits and vegetables. A man does not get sick or die in abstaining from meat. Rather a human being gets sick because he eats meat or too much of meat.

This campaign for hunger mitigation should be dealt in a continuum of cancer eradication. If the president is serious about mitigating the serious hunger problem in the country, she can start with her own diet. Then too must there be regulation in fastfood, restaurants, food manufacturing and in the entire logistics chain of food supply and production. The meal ordered in that New York restaurant was horribly cancer causing.

Come to terms with hypocrisy and get real. Be natural. There is wisdom in the saying that “an apple a day takes the disease away” so does mango, orange, peanuts and vegetables.