What with pesticides mixed in the foods, worms in cans and lizards in sandwiches, the world is getting riskier by the minute. You look at everything with suspicion and disdain. Even at an apple you scrape the skin off to remove the wax it has on it. You look at the crab and wonder how this skinny one would be two or three kilos!
Then there are the wholesome foods people. They sell you organically grown stuff which looks green and clean. You look at labels wondering if the environment is affected or not. You look at calories and ingredients used in the product. As if you knew, you nod your head in agreement to some wanted vitamins and added minerals.
You look at packaging and presentation also. You want to see how clean and fresh the stuff is inside and yet so much more hygienic. You love it when you see your kids open the packs with ease to gobble up the chunk of modified gluten free, trans-fat free or sugar free stuff full of goodness and health!
Granted all of the above have no harmful or bacterial contents, to destroy your health or happiness, yet you wonder if you are going for a great health-scam ride? You are, anyway! So enjoy the ride at your own generous expense. How does that happen, you ask?
I was following a show by George Carlin where he talks about germs and how we have become so particular about hygiene that we wash our hands so many times. We ensure there are no germs lurking around anywhere. But what we forget is the immunity system our body has built up with. We can survive the worst kind of attack from any kind of germs. He spoke of only 9000 people dying of food poisoning in USA that year, whereas too many people died of too many other causes.
We have to give our body the ability to practice germ control by fighting with actual germs. But what do we do? We mollycoddle ourselves and our children and keep them in a germ free and antiseptic environment. We are such ninnies that we quarantine ourselves from all kinds of germs and viruses.
Fear plays a very important role in making us so cautious. We care too much for what and how we eat.
In India children from the poorer homes are much more robust and strong. They eat anything and live on whatever they get. If they don’t have clothes they go without them. If the food that they get is cooked in highly adulterated oils, their body immune system has the ability to withstand it. The food or their bodies already have to much of feacal content, yet they are quite healthy and strong.
Look at the veggies grown, they already are full of filth and mud, yet no one gets stomach upset. But watch the foreigners who come here, they immediately get Delhi Belly or whatever the loosies are called. They seem to come from too hygienic a place that they can never survive the plethora of germs and other creatures.
Look at China or the ASEAN region, there people eat stuff which you wouldn’t even look at. Are they not healthy and fine? They have all kinds of meat and stuff which will make you squirm and be squeamish. But they are very healthy.
So stop acting silly and blow away this charade of going for health conscious stuff. When you eat green raw stuff, remember the cattle or goats. When you eat the unwashed fruit, try to think how you ate it as a child and never fell sick. When you buy all those hand washes and deodorants, germ killers and antiseptic soaps, bacteria free and germ free packaging materials, ask yourself, when are you going to fight these elements if you don’t even want to face them?
Nobody is asking you to be stupid but taking calculated risks is allowed. Sometimes you do not have place to wash your hands, would you want to buy a silly hand sanitizer? Can you just let it be. Can you not overdo the silly notion of cleanliness and behave normally. Kids eat from the floor when their food falls down and yet you are very cautious when your food falls down.
You wipe your ass in the loo with paper but don’t want to clean it with water. You don’t want to touch the ass but perform rimming and feel great about it? How stupid and silly can a man be?
You talk about washing hands when you go to the bathroom but you perform all kinds of sexual acts on the same so-called dirty organs? We love to have double standards.
So instead of becoming clinically perfect can we not allow some minor stuff to be taken care off by natural methods? Let our body and its defense mechanism perform action suitable for our own progress.
Keep your mind and body healthy by becoming stronger in both. Let you mind give you the right advice and let your body decide what is wrong or what is right. Don’t get so much paranoid that you will have to live in a health dome or freakishly clean place. Anyway you are programmed to die by other methods or means so give life a chance. Don’t be a health freak.
Don’t look at others and become a vegan or vegetarian. Don’t count too many calories. Stay safe and healthy. Indulge when you have to and abstain when you need to. Just follow your body and mind when it talks sense. Don’t do things just because you read or heard a fad. Do everything in moderation and don’t be afraid unnecessarily. Be bold sometimes.
Eat the gola or ice shaving with colored water, have a bhel puri, go to the beach and have a pani puri or golgappa. Eat the bhajias or fried stuff. Have ice creams or kulfis from the kulfiwala. Eat churmur or mixed stuff. Indulge in jhalmudi or spicy bhel too.
You have one life and if you die eating a tikka or a rosgulla, you will become immortalized when they will name it with your name. Just like they named Raj-bhog, akshaya-Patra, etc.. I hope you get the joke?
Anyway, have a Maggi or Cadbury, Coke or Pepsi, Haldiram or KC Das, Amul or Cornetto, Til oil or olive oil, whatever pleases you in moderation. Keep up to your limits and stay safe. But don’t become overly paranoid about your life.
Photo Credit: pixabay
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