Health is Wealth

“Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.” – Buddha

“It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.” – Billy Graham

“The first wealth is health.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some wise words by wise people. They knew and most of us also know the significance of good health in this world. As simple as it sounds, there are a few dimensions to good health. Diet and exercise in this day and age are seen to be the most effective players but there are some underdogs like sleep, lifestyle choices, effective breathing, general attitude towards life, etc that play a significant role in impacting your health.

Lets break each of these factors down but first what is health and what is deemed to be a healthy human being? Many of us have an opinion about this and in these times health so they also call fitness is a billion dollar industry that generates its profits by making you feel like shit on how you look and sells you all kinds of diets, workouts, supplements and surgeries to improve your so called “health” or more like how you look.

But Joe lets step back before you invest or more like waste your hard earned money into this commercialized crap. Your health is not a complicated piece of science that requires the innumerable commercial solutions available in today’s market to take care of itself. It’s more simple than you think. There is always a simpler solution to most of the problems, it’s we who make it more complicated at times by over-analyzing the situation, why do we do that? Just because we got too much time, money and energy to waste on something we think is affecting our health. This is deviating now so lets get back to the important point – Our Health

Lets go back in time to when we were born and how our bodies kept evolving from Day 1. All we ate then or more like we drank was our mother’s milk, we didn’t workout of course, just moved our hands and legs in the air when we were not sleeping and of course we cried, our only means of communication to let our parents know what a pain in the rear we were outside us expressing all our feelings through that single mode of communication and having our parents figuring out our Morse code. Truly ingenious !! Aah again this topic is getting so easy for me to get distracted to talk about other things..back to the point.

What I was trying to say was that we had a pretty simple life with absolutely no “responsibilities” and everything was taken care of. Piece of cake huh! Then we showed some signs of growth of course, and so did our diets and responsibilities started to grow too. While we were still growing we had fewer choices on what we ate and how we looked. Our parents/caretakers/guardians based on their experience in life decided what’s good or bad for us and we just accepted whatever came our way. We ate what was made available by our family and most of us had some form of activity in school, home or neighborhood and again our responsibilities had started adding up but we were still not that responsible. We were still being taken care of.

Then came adulthood where we started making our choices, we reached puberty and felt powerful like on top of the world. We could drink, smoke and do whatever we wanted. Health was taken for granted since we were invincible with our new ever-forgiving and never ending healthy hormones. Most of us could handle any amount of abuse in terms of food alcohol, sometimes drugs and would be still fine.

Well that was strike 1 right there. Those “choices” we made back then when we reached adulthood and some “choices” that we were meant to make when we were kids, more like our parents were choosing for us had an impact on our health. Now some people have got it made who grew up  with parents who were health/fitness freaks or had some ideologies of good health in place. Example – eat healthy, get some exercise in the form of chores, play sports, etc. But hey that doesn’t always mean that you are going to stay healthy for the rest of your life, one could still be on their own after they move out and undo all the good things they had been doing while they were living with their parents.

To summarize our health is influenced with the choices that we have been making directly or indirectly since the dawn of time. Our family and the environment that we grew up in plays an important role on how we eat, drink, sleep, breathe.  Basically how we live our life —– brings me to mention the next important buzz word – “Lifestyle”

Mr Lifestyle and Mrs Health go hand in hand. They are inseparable, more like a couple. If one goes down then it makes sure that it will bring down the other. I promise you that. They are pretty good at it. And most of the time it’s Mr Lifestyle who likes to take the lead on this.

Our Lifestyle is not just our diets and workouts. It’s so much more and yes it does start from how well you breathe. Yes that’s where it all starts, the most basic human necessity for survival – oxygen. We generally take it for granted until we are old enough to realize the importance of it.

Lifestyle also encompasses of our mental attitude, stress levels, hydration, sanitation, sleep patterns, enjoyment and relaxation and of course our food habits and physical activity. How could we forget that? I guess most of us just think that that’s what gives us good health. There is some truth there but that’s not everything that dictates good health. You might be really fit physically but super screwed up mentally. Does that mean that you are healthy? I don’t agree with that but I can’t change how others might feel about it.

Your Lifestyle is the choices you make at every second of your life on what you want to do with your life. Wow, now that sounds intense.

Back to the evolution and civilization that I had mentioned in my earlier post. We humans are a competitive race. Everyone wants to make it big, wants to come up with ideas and hit the jackpot. Who doesn’t enjoy money, power and fame in this society? Everyone does. Maybe the monk who sold his Ferrari doesn’t.

The food industry like any other industry is a competitive industry. Technological advancements cause the food industry to come up with ways to reduce the cost of production, make food tastier, increase shelf life, etc. All in all produce cheaper foods by mass producing them. And they don’t discriminate between foods that are grown vs foods that are raised. As long as there is mass production accompanied by low cost of production the method used to attain the final product doesn’t matter. This strategy has been working really well in making them rich. Who gives a damn about people’s health – the FDA?

Strike 2 – Food choices. We might think that we are watching our health by making healthier choices in the restaurants or by buying healthier precooked or frozen foods. Not really, outside the organic and GMO free realm (I will address that in a different topic) make an effort to read the list of ingredients that go into these frozen or precooked food items. I bet there will be some ingredients that you would have never heard of and some of them would be definite tongue twisters. I had read some wise words somewhere once – “Don’t put something into your system if you can’t pronounce or don’t understand what it is”. It’s food, it’s going into your body, it’s going to impact you in various ways. You better know what the heck it means before you go ahead and consume it.

Outside the “who the f*** knows” ingredient list you will be surprised with the amount of sodium some of these precooked meals are loaded with. Remember it’s a money making business. The person creating these are not going to really care what happens to your health as long as you buy and eat it and keep doing that for the rest of your life. Reminds me of the lyrics of the famous traffic song –

“And the man in the suit has just bought a new car
From the profit he’s made on your dreams”

More like the profit he made out of selling his chemical creation to you. High amounts of sodium in some of these foods is definitely not good for you. Some of you reading this already know what I am talking about. If you don’t then it’s time you google it.

Restaurants are another alternative that some people depend on for their daily meals, with the precooked foods you at least have and idea of what’s in your food. With most restaurant food you don’t even know what’s in there. For all you know they use precooked meals and charge you premium prices, who knows? No one really makes it into the restaurant’s kitchen to check what are these chefs upto. However most fast food chains have their ingredients list and nutritional information published on their website. That should give a fair idea of what goes into their meals. Some of these places feed you close to 3000+mg of sodium in a meal. That’s a crazy amount of salt consumption in a single meal.

I understand that in this busy day and life people don’t have time to “cook” their own meals especially when there are a ton of options to eat out. But hey no one can do a better job for you than you can for your own food which is going to impact your health. If you think the restaurants can then you are mistaken because it’s a business. It’s sole aim is to make profit.

And again cooking your own meals and packing them is not that big of a deal as it appears to be. You gotta start somewhere, eating out on a regular basis is definitely not a good lifestyle choice, period. I am not even mentioning the money you would be saving by not eating out here. That’s a topic for a different day.

Phew!! this is getting longer than I thought. I am still not done with this one. But I think I will publish this one now and continue about other lifestyle choices that affect our health in this post or a sequel to this one.

Happy Reading and don’t you dare comment. These are the 10 commandments from Moses himself !!