Modern Life Conveniences Causing Damage to Our Health?

Life styles of human being have changed hugely over the past two centuries. This started about two hundred years ago with industrial revolution. Use of oil and energy created another big change because these changed the pace of life fto very fast. These changes provided a lot of conveniences and luxuries but they have also changed our eating habits, which has adversely affected our health because our genes have been used to what our ancestors were used to for thousands of years. These conveniences have caused unintended consequences because of sedentary life style hence increasing risks to human health.

Let us see some of the changes that have damaged our health:

Over Abundance of Calories and Carbohydrates:
Few thousand years ago our ancestors lived on hunted food and gathered wild plants vegetables. This consisted mostly of protein and fat. Agricultural revolution brought us abundance of carbohydrate in our diet. High fructose corn syrup was added only 50 years ago. This is causing increased disease load in people with diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome.

Lack of Exercises:
Cars and means of communications are added to our lives just about 100 years ago. Fastest means of transport was horse or camel until then. Now we have become sedentary and non-active with cars and airplanes. Remote-controls fax and internet has made us even worse. Our daily walking used lot of calories in past, which has disappeared and those who are conscious of it now need gyms to work out.

Lack of sunshine and Vitamin D:
With facilities of air conditioning and fast transport our exposure to sun has been severely curtailed. In developed world a substantial percentage of us are hence Vitamin D deficient. This is causing a number of illnesses like depression, Alzheimer’s and cancers. Pundits say that Vitamin D is not only a vitamin but an enzyme that works on every cell of the body.

Radiation:
Our experimentation with radiation is also only about a century old when we started finding the radioactive isotopes. Our experience of radiation started with bombing of Japan in WWII and then three accidents in nuclear reactors since then. With such minimal experience we are thinking to embark on having major part of our need of electricity with nuclear power plants, which is frightening.

Genetically Modified (GM) foods:
We have embarked on this without enough experience and we do not know how it may hurt us. We need to know its long term implications before it is allowed universally.

Hormone supported animal rearing:
Major part of our meat and chicken now comes from farms where hormones and unknown chemical feed stocks are used to fatten the birds and animals. These substances are consumed by us every day with our food.

Chemicals and fertilizers:
These are now major industries to provide us food. The chemicals in the form of fertilizers and pesticides are ingested by us with our food on daily basis. Aside from that the chemicals produced in industries as by-products are disposed in water channels eventually consumed by humans through fish meals.

Possible ways to avoid damage to our health:

1. We should avoid excessive calories and carbohydrate to avoid diseases.
2. We all need to exercise regularly to keep fit, burn calories and avoid insulin resistance.
3. We need to make our own natural Vitamin D by exposing ourselves to sunlight for a few hours a day.
4. It is wrong to allow something in our food like GM foods, about which we do not know enough. We must discourage its use until we are sure.
5. Natural and synthetic chemicals are growing in number by millions. We should restrict use of unknown chemicals and of those known to hurt.
6. Radiation is a new issue from last century. We have accepted its use despite that we know it causes cancer. We need to have more information about it.

Almighty God is also against Carbohydrates?

For full disclosure, I am not a scholar of any religion. However, with simple logic and common sense I have tried to connect two important yet hypothetical dots, which have large bearing on our state of health. Because one of the dots, Adam and Eve belong to mythological legend mentioned in all three monotheistic religion, I start with this disclosure.

These dots are:

i)                Tremendous rise of incidence of disease load in recent past is closely related and directly proportional to our food intake and life style. I have attempted to tie this to

ii)               Narrative of Adam and Eve, which has basis in our all three major religions. I have tried to look at these two issues from outside the box and connect these two dots.

With this most famous story of God’s creation and punishment of Adam and Eve for non obedience of the Creator, I am adding the some hypothetical but logical and, I think, prudent observations to interpret the deleterious effects of Carbohydrates on our health. I am aware that I am stretching the story a little bit to prove the point that I believe in. My review of medical literature convinces me that starch and sugars are the main culprit for the recent disease load. Hence now you will understand why I have taken liberty to stretch the story a bit, only to drive home this point as strongly as possible.

God has created abundant food for all its creatures. However, some of these “foods” are good and others are not so good or even poisonous. We need to differentiate between these. Even the good foods are meant to be consumed in moderation.

Most of us know the story of Adam and Eve and how and why they were sent to planet Earth from Garden of Eden in heaven. All three traditions of monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam mention the creation of Adam and Eve (Eve is named Hawwa in Islam). Because they both ate fruit forbidden by God (and did not obey Him) they were banished from heaven.

Torah and Bible mention that God ordered them not to eat the “fruit” from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Most of the Western religious books mention in explanations that the forbidden fruit was apple (though few explanations name some other different fruits). According to Islamic traditions this forbidden food is said to be grains of wheat.

OUR ANCESTORS; From Adam and Eve until now:

It is evident from ancient history that our forefathers lived in caves or huts. The men hunted animals for meat and caught fish. Women collected wild berries or vegetation. This was their food, which was not guaranteed every day. The day they found food, they ate, the day nothing was found, they went hungry. Hence there may have been some gaps in their daily intake of food. There was no electricity, fridge or cooling facility in olden days and hence food had to be fresh every day.

Agriculture started about ten thousand years ago. Fruits seem to have been found much later and the orchards of fruits are a novelty of past few hundred years only. Only until few hundred years ago the fruits were scarce and eaten by rich occasionally. It is only recently that ingenious farmers and horticulturists have made the availability of grains and fruits abundant. Human beings have transgressed from a situation of scarcity of food on the verge of ongoing famine to over abundance in the past few centuries.

PREVALENCE OF DISEASES AND KNOWN CAUSES:

We all are aware that as we are consuming a lot more calories than we need in recent times. In our life lives, thinking back, we realize that our serving size has gotten much larger. Our big calorie and large and various grain and fruit consumption can be seen almost directly proportional to the increase in our contracting more and more diseases. Prevalence of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, depression, Alzheimer and cancers, all have tremendous increase of incidence. These are all interconnected diseases. Each of them has increased prevalence as we consume more and more grains and fruits, i.e. calories, starch and carbohydrates.

This may sound very simplistic way of explaining the wrath of God that is delivered on mankind when the mythological stories are made relevant to the present status of our diseases. But the scientific evidences and simple logic when combined with such mythological story of creation of lives by God and sending them to planet earth because of consuming the “forbidden” fruit makes a lot of sense.

Facts that we know today:

We have known for over 80 years that Glucose is directly related to cancer and that cancer cells thrive in it. A German biochemist, Dr. Otto Warburg discovered this in 1923 and he received 1931 Nobel Prize for doing so.

• We also know that our glucose levels in blood remains elevated in diabetes and our high intake of sugars and starch causing resistance to insulin.
• During past century our new life style and residential and working condition has reduced our exposure to sun drastically and hence a substantial percentage if our population is Vitamin D deficient. This vitamin is touted as causative factor of all above mentioned diseases and perhaps many more.
• Our sedentary life style is taking its toll because we are not “using” the extra calories that we eat with almost no exercise.
• We are feeding corn to animals instead of grass to fatten them quickly and hence the quality of meat that we are eating is not as good as it used to be. It likely contains more saturated fat consisting of less Omega 3 fatty acids.
• Our cattle are given bovine growth hormone (rBGH) to fatten them. Incidentally rBGH) is officially allowed to be used In US only and no other Western developed country. So much so that our US produced rBGH laden meat is banned in all the European countries.
• Poultry farming as an industry was unheard of just over a hundred years ago. The chicken after being hatched from egg will take over 100 days to come to our dinner table as food. In contrast to that, today if the chicken is not sold for eating on about 49th day, the “industry” is likely go in loss. Hence to make them dinner ready the fowls are fed corns, fish meal, and given hormonal injection to fatten them as soon as possible.
• Crops of grains and fruits that we eat are likely to be contaminated with chemicals from fertilizers and pesticides; many such chemicals are touted to be carcinogens.
• Seeds are genetically modified (GM) to avail higher yield per acre. Again US are at forefront to allow GM seeds and crops for human consumption. We do not have long enough experience of their benefits or harms through scientific studies.
• Fruits are the only source of fructose sugars in nature, which is metabolized separately in liver and not like glucose in all cells of body.
• Since about 1970s when it started as High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) by Japan, we are consuming more and more fructose in almost all cola drinks and juices and almost everything that we eat. For industries, it is cheaper and sweeter than glucose. It is becoming evident that fructose is harmful (touted to be even poison by some experts). It is making our children addicted to sweets and harming their liver.

CONNECTING THE DOTS:

Now coming back to the story of Adam and Eve; it makes perfect sense why God Almighty had ordered them not to eat the fruits, which are the source of fructose, and wheat, which is source Carbohydrate and starch. In larger scheme of things, with the lives on planet for thousands upon thousands years old, our experience and experiment with Carbohydrate has been very limited. Agriculture, which brought to us grains, is only few thousand years old. And Fructose has been introduced to our foods only in 1970s. We know that grains contain a lot of carbohydrates, which coupled with vitamin D deficiency (resulting from modern life style), are potent cause of increasing incidence of diabetes and obesity, insulin resistance and perhaps depression, Alzheimer and cancer also.

It may be late already, but let us hope not too late. Let us heed, listen and interpret His anger and fury causing banishment of Adam and Eve from Garden of Eden because of disobeying His command. I believe we are now further disobeying Him by being congenial with the forbidden foods. Our children are becoming sugar addict by adding untested sugars like Fructose and HFSC to our diet. We need to wake up and start correcting ourselves. Let us analyze what are we doing and where we are heading. If our direction is not corrected, we shall soon face extinction of lives on the planet. This sounds dramatic and apocalyptic. But food about which we do not know enough and radiation, (again a new experiment of last less than hundred years), which is neither felt nor seen, both creations of the past few centuries have likely take us to brink. Stop this madness. Save mankind. This is for us, our progeny and lives on this planet earth for many generations to come on this planet.