Did you know that what you’re eating could be eating you up and pushing you to your early grave? Now, that’s a grave thought!
Not too long ago, CNN Health and Time magazine reported that there are five diseases that account for nearly two-thirds of all deaths in the US (an estimated 900,000 every year). These are: heart disease, cancer, lung disease, stroke, and unintentional injuries, including medication overdoses and car accidents.
Vis-a-vis the morbid statistics, the good news, according to a recent Morbidity and Mortality report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP), at least one-third of all these deaths could be prevented.
CNN declares, “We already know how to do it — now, we need to act on what we know. Whether it’s by investing resources, using proven strategies or coordinating with health care systems, we have within our communities the strengths to help people live long and healthy lives.”
Of course, you and I know that a lot of these diseases could be prevented if, as the experts recommended, we adopted healthy habits — such as eating a balanced diet and not overeating, exercising, not smoking, getting enough sleep, or laughing more and stressing less. However, as we grow older, there’s a greater chance for us to develop diet-related diseases, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, gout, osteoporosis, etc.
As you probably know, Americans spend a whopping 95 percent of their food dollars on processed foods, most of which, according to mercola.com, “contain one or more of the three ingredients that promote the most chronic disease.” These “morbid” ingredients are: highly processed high fructose corn syrup; trans fat-containing vegetable oils, of which soy is a main source; and refined sugar.
These deadly ingredients promote heart disease, stroke, obesity, diabetes, and cancer. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that “consuming 17-21 percent of your daily calories from added sugar increases your risk of death from cardiovascular disease by 38 percent.”
Another recent study concludes, “Too much sugar does not just make us fat; it can also make us sick.”
To make matters worse, there’s the excessive use of pesticides/herbicides and antibiotics in agriculture which, so research has shown, “can cause disruptions to your neurological system and your brain.”
According to The Environmental Protection Agency, 60 percent of herbicides, 90 percent of fungicides, and 30 percent of insecticides are considered carcinogenic (causing cancer).
Take note: “These man-made neurotoxic chemicals can bioaccumulate in your body, as they resist breaking down in water and also accumulate and store in fat. This means your body has a very hard time eliminating them once they enter your body.”
Then there’s the public health threat caused by feeding animals with low doses of antibiotics for them to grow faster. This has triggered the growth of antibiotic-resistant pathogens that sadly claim the lives of some 23,000 Americans every year.
The Centers for Disease Control reports that as much as 22 percent of antibiotic-resistant illness in humans is related to food.
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Mental health in the workplace
“Work you do not enjoy is a prison,” Corazon Alma de Leon, former DSWD Secretary and now a member of the board of directors of the World Association for Psychosocial Rehabilitation, tells us.
Working with disaster victims and seeing the face of tragedy as part of her daily routine (you can say she eats disaster for breakfast), de Leon has learned, “one never knows when one can be strong enough or too weak to weather the storm.”
She elaborates, “I decided to focus on mental health in the workplace because in the government alone, we have nearly 1.5-million workforce. In the private sector, how many call center workers succumb to pressures of work that they become dysfunctional, vulnerable to drugs and other health problems? How many personnel officers and human resource managers are able to distinguish an employee’s inability to cope due to personal or family problems?”
She further asks, “How can an employer determine when an employee is just a non- performing asset or facing neurological and psychological adjustments?”
True, there are a lot of wellness programs, de Leon points out, but not much deals with the psychosocial aspects of emotional illness. “Many human resource department workers are hamstrung handling employees suffering from anxiety or depression conditions that are attributed to family concerns or are work-related.”
Fact is, when she was chair of the Civil Service Commission, she was told that in one government department alone, there were no less than 200 personnel suffering from emotional problems.
In conclusion, de Leon gives this magic formula: “Yes, this is the magic we all seek at the World Association for Psychosocial Rehabilitation (WAPR). The ‘W’ means ‘we’ have to engage the patient in the world of work for work is the antidote to despair. As St. Ignatius said, ‘Work as if everything depended on you and pray as if everything depended on God.’ The ‘A’ is to have ‘associates’ help the patient move to recovery. The ‘P’ is to insure ‘productivity’ at home and at work. The ‘R’ is definitely ‘recovery’ and rehabilitation. We all must seize that opportunity to find mental health in the workplace not later but now.”