After the birth of my fourth child, I was diagnosed with having high blood pressure. (I know four children what do I expect!) I was told by my doctor that my high blood pressure wasn’t due to the expected stress of having a job, own company, mortgage and four children, not forgetting my lovely husband. No, her conclusion was that my high BP was a direct result of a family inherited sickness and my ethnic background.
Well, that didn’t sit right with me, so I pondered on her diagnoses and did a little research of my own. Why do we get high blood pressure? Well there’s not a conclusive fact sheet as to why it occurs, but there is a list of things you can do to try and reduce your BP or prevent it from rising. So in realising the prevention is a life style change, I started to look at the life style of my family, past and present and also of my ethnic origin.
As a descendant of the afro-caribbean race, we obviously had past down traditions regarding the way we live, but these traditions weren’t always the best for us. When we lived in our homelands of the West Indies and Africa, the foods we ate were organic and farmed freshly each day for consumption. When we migrated to the West we brought our recipes with us. Unfortunately we didn’t have the luxury of a fresh supply of our traditional foods to cook. Our parents had to adapt and compromise, which led to the wide spread epidemic of high BP and diabetes in the afro Caribbean people.
Yes, this is a bold statement I’m making but the facts speak for itself. Our foods as tasty as they are, are filled with processed salt and refined sugars. Imagine trying to supply a nation with exotic foods from all round the world at an affordable cost. The food industry had to think of ways to maintain the taste of foods, while preserving the look and quality. This is where the labs technicians come into it, they designed preservatives and additives. However people didn’t take to kindly to ingredients they didn’t understand, so the labs thought how can we make this apple last two weeks or more without rotting on the food shelves or this chicken grow fast enough to meet the growing demand of the consumers. This is why we have hybrid fruit and vegetables developed without seeds, while being grown out of their seasons. Or shelf foods packed with salt and sugar to disguise the awful tasteless crap they’re trying to sell us.
Lets not be fooled, when you mess with the food it’s going to mess with YOU!!
This way of eating can only damage our bodies, we eat in excess of what our bodies can actually adsorb. If you eat anything that has been pumped with growth hormones, are not those same hormones going to have an effect on us. Maybe not immediately but long term! I wonder why there are so much more cancers and other diseases occurring in people now, that didnt exist 60 years ago. We no longer eat fresh food but buy poultry, meat and vegetables that has been forced grown through genetics and growth hormones. We season our foods not with fresh herbs like before but with refined processed salt and sugar filled seasoning.
I remember a conversation with my Father-in-law, his mother lived to 106 years of age. I was amazed at how long she lived for and I asked him what was her secret. He told me that my generation and generations to come will never live to see their nineties let alone hundred. This was due to all the rubbish we eat and how are foods are not organically grown. He said when he was young growing up in Jamaica, everyday his mother would give him a tonic of herbs and spices to nourish his body and aid his development. This was something she was taught and was passed down through the generations. It was this same up bringing that has made him and his mother strong. I’m not saying we all need a miracle green tonic to make us live to one hundred, but we do need to be conscious of what we put into our bodies and the long term effects it will have on us.
Think about it, would we fill a petrol run car with diesel, no because it would damage the engine. We have to fill a car with the right fuel it was made to consume, its the same with our bodies. We were made naturally and perfect, so why fill out bodies with unnatural substances, it will only damage it?
The question is how permanent will the damage be?
You decide……
I was ten when my primary school teacher asked who would like to correspond with a pupil in another country, she said they would be our pen-pals.
