Everything in moderation. I think that’s a great motto to live by, I think most of us do, but the question then is what is moderation? How do we know what is a moderate amount of anything? We live with supermarkets and packaged foods; we live in 2 storey brick homes with carpets or polished floors and teflon coated frying pans; we drive cars to work and sit behind a desk all day…
Are you hearing this? Does this sound like what we were biologically designed to do? So is one pizza a week moderation or two? But what if on the other nights you have fish and chips or KFC – is one pizza still moderation or only if you have veggies the other 6 nights?
My point is the collective threat. Do you know you’re better off standing in the street breathing in the car exhaust than sitting in your car? The off-gassing from the materials in your car when it sits in the sun is really bad for your health. Not to mention the stuff from your carpet and paint in your house; your new clothes; the fragrances in your shampoo and the preservatives in your food…
So then our health starts to break down and we get medicine – the synthetic stuff cause anything natural you can’t patent (ie there’s no money to be made). There are side effects to injesting synthetic chemicals and we have to treat the side effects….with more chemicals. Add to this the vaccines you’ve been injected with and the Electromagnetic bombardment you’re getting from your Wi-Fi…so where is it? This thing we call moderation?
At school our kids are expected to sit still and “learn” – kids don’t sit still and learn. They aren’t biologically built to sit still for hours on end – not something to aspire to either when you think about it and yet they get in trouble if they don’t. It’s not making sense…any of it. Where is moderation?
I’m not saying that there aren’t benefits to modern living – I’ve been to Africa, I’ve been to SE Asia and Central America. I like having clean water and a choice of food to eat. I like not fearing for my life every day as I experienced in some countries where jobs are scarce and drug-running is not. But let’s just take a step back, please!
We now inject newborn babies with a vaccine for something they won’t get exposed to until they become sexually active or drug addicts. We have chemicals in our food and cosmetics that are BANNED in other first-world countries (Europe, Japan and Canada) because they are known carcinogens. We KNOW that the teflon coating in our frying pans is really dangerous, but only when heated (?!) – so when do we say, hey, l think it might have got a little out of control…
We have Maccas proudly sponsoring our kids soccer and KFC the world-class cricketers (like any elite athlete would ever injest KFC, seriously). We have the cancer council sponsoring cancer-causing products so they can make some money for cancer research (wtf?).
…and in the end, what is my point? Well, I have copped a lot of criticism recently for the degree to which I navigate my way through this mayhem. I’m told I’m a little extreme with the way I deny my children rubbish food. I’m a little too hippie and alternative about my approach to medicine. I’d like to home-school rather than see my kids sit in a classroom and witness behavioural issues all day instead of learn. I overuse the word TOXIN (well they ain’t fluffy bunnies).
But given all this, ALL the crap we face in our daily lives – am I really extreme or just trying to get back to some sort of moderation? If I can cut out the toxic overload as much as possible, aren’t I achieving a closer estimation? Is being exposed to toxin, chemical, hormone, preservative (and that’s just lunch!) – is that moderation? Or is that scary? We are only starting to see the implications of our lifestyle now with the masses of chronic disease becoming prevelant, particularly with young children (never seen before in all of history). It’s only going to get worse.
I’m not saying we need to live in mud huts and eat rice and beans all day, but I’d like to think that the health and safety of the masses of chemicals we are exposed to on a daily basis is going to be better regulated – the really bad ones banned and the rest looked at in concert. There is no point studying a drug or chemical on it’s own for toxicity, we are never just exposed to one thing at a time – look at how bad it is in a cocktail of other chemicals in an already overloaded toxic system. THAT is what we are facing, so let’s start taking it seriously and dealing with it.
Moderation? Pfft, wouldn’t recognise it if it jumped up and bit us.
So what can we do? We can opt for nourishing ourselves, reducing stress and toxic load. If we get sick, go to bed not to the hospital (unless life-threatening, obviously). We can take small steps to detox ourselves, our homes, our lives. It’s not going to be perfect, but we can be more aware. We can expect better from ourselves and our governments – if we demand it, in time they can only deliver. There is a shift, it’s happening now. We will be the deliverers of change…