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Balanced diet versus junk food
SCIENTISTS have demonstrated that within a matter of
months, humans lose all the molecules that their
bodies possess. This happens because the human
organism is constantly renewing itself via three
elements: the air one breathes, the liquid one
drinks and the food one eats.
The
balance of those elements is important for everyone,
notes Dr. Concepción Campa, because to the extent
that that balance is achieved, one gains a positive
relationship with nature, society and oneself. Dr.
Campa is the director of the Carlos J. Finlay
Institute, and the discoverer of the only anti-menigococcus
Type B vaccine that exists. She also emphasizes the
importance of adequate nutrition in achieving good
health, because what one eats and what one thinks
are decisive to one’s stability.
If
we eat adequately and have our emotions under
control, illnesses won’t be able to find a way into
our bodies. “Illnesses take over because of
emotional or nutritional imbalances,” Dr. Campa
says. She refers us to an experiment underway at the
institute she directs, where a specialized staff is
cultivating vegetables and other plants in a kitchen
garden with the purpose of obtaining a balanced diet
for curing illnesses.
The
research is based on a traditional Chinese medicine
method that establishes five pairs of organs in the
human body related to an equal number of basic
flavors, where each flavor feeds each pair of these
organs.
Salty flavors feed the kidney system; acidic flavors
feed the liver; bitter flavors feed the heart; sweet
flavors feed the spleen and pancreas, and spicy
flavors feed the lung system.
These are all interwoven, the doctor says, noting
that all of the pairs indicated are related to
emotions. Going into more depth on the topic, she
gives examples: the person who only ingests sweet,
acidic and salty food creates an imbalance in the
various systems, since they are all interwoven. The
same thing happens with those who consume a lot of
sugar; it causes imbalances that affect the
emotions.
Dr.
Campa’s explanation takes up aspects of traditional
Chinese medicine that relate fear to the kidney and
anger to the liver. She refers to a thought of José
Martí’s, where he warns that only the weak get
angry, and proceeds to reflect on the relationship
between anger and fear.
Just
feeling that you can’t control something can provoke
anger, she notes.
On
stressing the importance of a balanced diet, she
warns about the impact on emotions of an unbalanced
diet. This was something that even Hippocrates put
forward, when he declared that we are only what we
think and what we eat.
Expanding on that topic, she places special emphasis
on how globalization brings with it an abandonment
of food culture, and how that is linked to various
conditions of ill health, among them obesity.
She
criticizes the so-called junk food that the
transnational corporations sell to the food
industry.
In
their selfishness to accumulate wealth, they have
committed the terrible crime of refining foods, she
says, eliminating what is most important for
nutrition and leaving what is the least important
for consumption. As an example, she cites refined
flour, which lasts longer than whole-grain flour,
which is more quickly attacked by bacteria and
fungi. It is precisely the best nutrients that are
attacked by microorganisms, which know where to go
for food. The same thing happens with processed
rice, which is less nutritious than rice that has
not been polished. It is a cereal that contains
minerals, vitamins, amino acids and other beneficial
elements lost in the process of polishing rice for
marketing.
Dr.
Campa reiterates that the type of longevity that we
wish for is inconceivable without a constant,
incessant search for balance in each individual that
will lead to similar balance within the family,
society, countries and then in nature.
Because to speak of longevity with quality of life,
one must take a comprehensive, multifaceted view of
all the elements that compose that balance in human
beings, she concludes.
For more information:
redac2@granmai.cip.cu |
