So for the last few days, I was fighting a problem. I had a headache that just wouldn’t go away. This was starting to have me concerned because I don’t really have what I would say is access to the best medical care in the world. Seems I had been a victim to an old marketing problem. A rather simple one that could have killed me I suppose. See living in the desert has some key areas that one must be acutely aware of for the sake of staying healthy. The locals don’t have to think about it as it’s a way of life for them…but someone like me…well let’s just say that it requires a conscious effort to stay on top of things that are second nature to the locals. What is it you say? Well it’s about water and staying hydrated. In my country, there has often been a big push to make sure everyone consumes a certian amount of water every day in order to stay healthy. Sounds good, drink water, stay hydrated, be healthy. You never hear don’t drink too much water, it can kill you if you overdo it. That would be bad for marketing….Marketing? Water? Well, there is a bottled water industry that sells it by the boxload. I have access to it here all the time and I am thankful for it. However, the combination of being warned to stay hydrated in the desert and the push for drinking it all the time caused me to believe that you just couldn’t really drink enough water here in the desert. There’s a catch, I also don’t have as much salt in my diet just by the nature of what foods I have been eating here. In short, I should be in good health with low salt in my diet and drinking plenty of water. That’s where the problem came in. I was drinking lots of water and getting very little salt. I ended up with a monster headache that lasted for a couple of days. I thought I might die if it went unchecked. So, I did a little reading…what little you can do with a migrane and found that hyponatremia described what I was feeling and delaing with…maybe. So I started taking a little salt and felt better but knew I couldn’t do to much at once as it’s got to be slowly increased in the body. So I waited until I get to work and then proceeded to consume a bag of spicy salty pork rinds along with a little miracle cure from Switzerland called Volt Fast which also is a diclofenac potassium. It’s for the treatment of many of the symptoms accompanied by hyponatremia. In short, I was able to figure out that I was buying into the marketing speak of staying well hydrated and not knowing I could over do it and also avoiding salt because we are told it’s bad for us.
So what’s the new look at an old problem? During my last few days, I saw a movie that talked about how we in America are sold via marketing on so many diets and eating trends that are supposed to make us healthier and more attractive. The approach form the movie was different. It talked about the fact that we are programmed by nature to store calories in the form of fat for lean times when foods are scarce. In our current society we don’t really have such lean times because food is so plentiful. As a result, we may eat things that are fattening and our body does what designed to do…store the extra calories we don’t burn…as fat. The flip side of the storage of fat from foods we eat is that often the fatty foods we eat are not very nutritous. We continue to eat them because the body is craving something that will satiate us and make us feel satisfied. That feeling of satisfaction comes from the nutrients in the foods we eat but we don’t ever achieve that feeling and satisfaction so we keep eating what we have been told is good for us. This constant craving is what food companies rely on. If we can be sold a product that we think we are craving, eat it and then crave it again, they have created an addiction in us with food and they have a direct line to our cashflow. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? I know, that many people will say that it’s hard to believe that and why would anyone do something like that? In a word…MONEY. Plain and simple.
Do you think that the corporations out there really care about your health or do you think that they care about selling you a product that you will return to buy over and over again? I’d opt for the latter because they certianly don’t just keep the places they they operate to package your food in clean working order because they are concerned for your health. It’s because they don’t want to be shut down and loose money because they can’t sell you their product.
This show also talked about sugar and flour. The first two ingredients are found in many of the foods we eat. Sugar is the main one. It’s converted to fat and stored for future lean times. (That we never see) It’s also what is used to create that taste that keeps us coming back for more. They even mentioned milk in the program…as if it’s not sweet enough and now you can buy powders that are mixed into it and make it taste like sweet bananas or strawberry or chocolate. We are marketed the chemicals that our body craves and is designed to store. It is what keeps us coming back and keeps us fat.
Why do they sell us foods that aren’t really good for us? It’s because we buy them. If we stopped buying foods that were really unhealthy for us, the only thing that Food “manufacturers” could do is find ways to repackage food that is good for us and that would usually come in the form of “natural foods” There are some companies who offer products that are actually healthy and they are in my book where I am going to start trying to gravitate towards. It’s not going to be easy but I am going to try that this year. I am going to try to gravitate towards the fresh produce and lean meats see just how that works out. I think I will be better off this year and maybe I will be able to blog a bit about that now that the bills are paid off and this appears to be a worthwhile goal.
You will also note that I don’t have a goal of losing any weight here as the point is just to start eating more healthy foods, especially when I return home as I know it’s hard to do in America.
The Movie is “Hungry for Change” and I recommend it.
Rowland Ramble - 