ONE of the most pressing concerns of Pinoys today is catching deadly viruses, especially the Covid-19. Truth to tell, a bout with an illness of a member of a Filipino household is a major cause of financial distress, and debt.
But why is there sickness?
High-tech modern living especially in congested urban centers like primate cities, greatly limits our access to the natural fresh air, water, sunlight, organic vegetables, fruits, and herbs. There is also this high-wired urban life coming to the max; all night partying, Internet surfing, or watching cable TV. The advent of outsourcing companies in the form of call centers has seen Filipinos work all night, defying the circadian rhythm. Filipinos, especially in big cities, are living out the dizzying pace of industrial living, and are greatly stressed out.
These physical and mental stresses to which a person is subjected to according to Dr. Paavo Airola, leading exponent of Biological Medicine, “leads to systemic derangement and biochemical and metabolic disorder.” Contributing factors to body dysfunction are faulty nutritional habits, constant overeating, overindulgence in proteins and the body’s inability to properly digest them. Nutritional deficiencies, sluggish metabolism, and resulting retention of toxic metabolic wastes, exogenous poisons from polluted, water, air and environment, toxic drugs, tobacco and alcohol, lack of sufficient exercise, rest and relaxation, severe emotional and physical stresses-- all these act jointly to bring about sickness.
At the level of the individual, interconnected personal factors determine good health: the body’s structural system, the body’s biochemical processes, mind, emotions, as well as the spiritual dimension of each person.
A person does not live as an “isolate,” thus he is also affected by other factors: economic, environmental, physical, psycho-social and even political. Added factors are technology-based: multi-media, cellphones and Internet. Nutritional imbalance and personal lifestyle also are great factors. All these interacting factors affect our health.
Clearly, based on the biological concept of medicine, the primary cause of a disease is not the bacteria or virus, but the weakened resistance brought about by man’s health-destroying living habits and physical and emotional stresses.
According to Dr. Airola, the health-destroying environmental factors “bring about derangement in all vital body functions with the consequent biochemical imbalance in the tissues, autotoxemia, chronic undersupply of oxygen to the cells, poor digestion and ineffective assimilation of nutrients...and gradually lowered resistance to disease.” When we thus subject our body to severe stresses, our body reacts with self-defense.
Global Trends
The rise of modern supermarkets that defined modern food “foraging”, genetic modification of seeds, plants and animals that gave birth to GMO products, ‘factory farming’ of chicken, pigs and cows, widespread use of growth hormones and anti-biotics, high-tech processing of food, sewage water recycling for drinking, etc., have given rise to 21st-century diseases and ailments.
How and what we eat has radically changed over the past few decades with the all-consuming rise of the supermarket. But what price are we paying for the homogenized, cheap and convenient food that supermarkets specialize in? In a two-part program, British broadcaster Jane Moore investigates how supermarkets have affected the food on our plates and reveal the tell-tale signs that the food we buy may not have been grown in the way we think. Using a combination of undercover filming and scientific analysis, her documentary, “Supermarket Secrets” investigates whether the food on supermarket shelves is really as good as it looks, whether prices are as good as they seem and what happens behind the scenes in the production of supermarket food.
One only needs to scan daily news and Internet “info” sources to see how modern technology and global socio-politics are threatening to shorten our life span. Just what is seriously wrong with modern societies’ food supply? Chemically treated produce, highly processed foods, and refined ingredients like white flour and sugar cause sickness and disease as well as a host of minor ailments such as digestive issues and lack of energy.
To be continued...