Friday, June 30, 2006

Diabetes and Agriculture

"We're still eating the left overs of World War II" V.S.

Why do we eat what we eat?

Is it our families tastes, our own, our society and is it really good food?

When we think of diabetes...one of the first associations is SUGAR.

We practice a kind of moral blindness towards sugar. We all know chocolate bars, cake, candy, and cookies are sugar. As parents we try to control the amount of sugar our children digest.

We feel rice, potatoes, corn, bread, noodles, crackers and bagels are healthy nutrition choices and feed our children and each other these foods. We make sauces and peanut butter and jam and spicy recipes to tart up these bland foods and make them "gourmet". Our stomachs digest rice, noodles and bread almost as quickly as cake and cookies and then we need to release insulin to counteract the blood sugar response to noodles. These starches have almost no nutritional value so we make synthetic vitamins and minerals and add them to the products. Read the labels on your bread and noodles and rice. Iron and B vitimins are added because they have almost no nutritional value. Our bodies process refined carbohydrates(bread, rice, noodles) as if they were sugar: too quickly therefore shocking our systems to produce insulin or crash.

Corn is refined and added to one fourth of the products in your grocery stores. It works like a binding agent and a simple sugar to preserve and whore up your tastebuds.

It is easy to find the link in contemporary society between warfare and agriculture. We grow most of our crops with nitrogen fertilizer. Agriculture became easier after the second World War by the invention of fertilizer...by the same scientist who made the gases for concentration camps.

Dependance on oil is not predominantly reflected by driving cars. We need fossil fuel to grow food. One bushel of corn needs one gallon of oil.

But we have our challenges. 2 out of 5 people would not be alive right now if it weren't for synthetic fertilizer. We want all people to be healthy and happy and have the best for their friends and family...don't we?

How does everyone eat yet not screw over the planet and each other?

The fertilizers we produce and then don't use go into the air and cause damage with acids. We have so many people alive with so much hate and our conflict looks like religious war...but it may actually be fighting for air and soil and food.

Ever seen a kid after eating chocolates and cookies? Right. It happens to adults too. All those fancy pasta dinners...then the pasta slump after eating. Mood swings and depression are often, largely encouraged by blood sugar levels. Have you ever had conflicts compounded by mood swings? The whole planet is acting like a mood swing.
Ever notice how people with food disorders or diabetes often reveal they have bouts with depression?

Not only is warfare linked to agriculture...but our spiritual health and mental health is partly controlled by our diets. Our obsession with nutrient poor foods is threatening the planets health and our ability to resolve conflicts. Since noodles and rice and potatoes and bread have so little nutritive value, we need to eat extra portions of them. These foods keep us hungry and craving large servings of them. Why not eat chicken, salad and a vegetable and skip the huge portion of rissotto? Put the rissotto sauce on the chicken instead? Perhaps as an experiment to clear our heads of sluggish food and see if we can find new ways to grow food or choose food?

The watered down lazy food of farming is starving us to death while fattening us, while building a constant matrix of mood depressions, hate, violent conflict and competition. I suggest we look to the diets and food economies of aboriginals and hunter-gatherer communites to help solve our food production challenges.

We have created a cycle of dependance on growing food to maintain all our populations, threatened space for living with farms and we live off bomb fodder to keep all of us fighting mad.

God is not our problem, food is our achilles heel.

We need to re-evaluate what we are cooking for dinner.

References:
Corn
Farming and Mental Health
Economic Mistake of Farming
Diabetes Awareness
Wheat
Food, Money, Ethics

7 comments:

mister anchovy said...

hey Candy,
off to Halifax in the morning...back home Thursday night...my computer has stopped...some kind of power supply problem....grrrrrrrrr

Anonymous said...

dp is alwasy depressed but it was b4 tha meds gimme diabetes

Candy Minx said...

Well, that is a good point, there are meds out there that provoke diabetes(ie:seroquil)...but I have a feeling the diabetes was well on its way. In fact diabetes illness has similar behavioural traits as some mental or chemical illnesses. So does hypoglycemia.

Red said...

Hmm.... food for thought (pardon the terrible pun). I am well aware of the shortcomings of my diet (not enough protein, industrial quantities of carbs), but I had no idea that I might be walking straight into diabetes.

There’s some illuminating stuff in your post. Are you a veggie, Candy? I’m only asking because turning my back on meat is what drove me straight into the arms of those nasty (but oh-so-tasty!) carbs. It’s hard to keep a balance, and maybe I went into the veggie thing without the right tools and knowledge to keep it up. I’m back on the meat now (though I don’t often enjoy it).

Candy Minx said...

I eat like a grizzly bear most of the time Red. Salmon, berries, meat more meat and meat and salad. I realize we likely need to keep growing food to supply the population...but why not just eat the good stuff. I call noodles and bread and potatoes=prison food!

:)

I just think we really need to make some choices...it's just as easy to eat a little nutrient rich food as it is to eat a lot of nutrient weak food. NO?

thehealingroom said...

Hi Candy,
I have been meaning to hear your fab-body secret.
So its Meat? Like the Atkins diet?

Candy Minx said...

Hi ya Healing Room...well, not meat per se, but I have always disliked processed foods. I call bread and noodles processed. I eat a lot of salad and vegies and some meat.

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