Health and Fitness
Good health is not an accident. While most people are born normal, that is, in fair health, quite a few are not. Anyone can readily understand that men, and especially women, who are heavy smokers or drinkers, also those suffering from the consequences of venereal diseases, as well as other chronic afflictions, can offer a poor heredity to their offspring. Good health begins before one is born. If you want to have healthy children you must be healthy yourself, and live a wholesome life.
Good health is acquired and maintained only through correct living. You could not imagine yourself living in dissipation, subsisting on a diet of candy, pastry, and soda pop, working long hours indoors, getting very little rest and sleep, and still looking the picture of health and feeling fine. This is simply impossible. We are created by nature according to certain definite and infallible laws, and when we break these laws we must suffer the consequences-disease and premature death.
When we look closely at our present-day living we will admit that we have strayed rather far from living according to nature’s laws. The primitive man lived a simple life: he ate foods in their original form just as nature grew them; he lived outdoors where he had plenty of sunshine, pure air to breathe, bodily exercise to keep his outer, as well as inner, muscles in good shape; and he had hardly any worries or dissipation. In contrast to that, we now live in an age of great comforts and little physical exertion; we breathe in the polluted air of our cities; we hide from sunshine and the outdoors; and, worst of all, we gorge ourselves with devitalized, manufactured-for-profit foods; we indulge in stimulating drinks, and waste our nervous energy on modern pleasures.
Is there any wonder that we have to pay a heavy price for this wholesale breaking of nature’s laws? Take a look at our overcrowded hospitals, insane asylums, and jails, and you will understand what havoc our modern living wreaks on us.
True, lately we have learned quite a bit about hygiene and nutrition; we have succeeded in increasing the span of human life somewhat over man’s span of a few hundred years ago — but this is nothing in comparison with primitive man’s longevity. With all these modern discoveries we are still in a sorry state. It is an accepted fact and no surprise to anyone that no single person in our modern countries is in perfect health. This, in itself, is a tacit admission that something is wrong with us, because normally a person should be well — not sick. Diseases pile up upon humanity so fast nowadays that the medical science cannot keep up with them. Our hospitals refuse admittance for lack of bed space and our cemeteries are expanding fast. No wonder it costs so much to be sick and buried!
What is then the main cause of our present-day deterioration in health? The worst offense against our body is our mode of eating. When we stop to analyze the basic causes of all the sickness in and around us we cannot help noticing that, as bad as they are, all other causes lead to less destruction than our eating habits. We will also notice that any bodily function performed by us involuntarily will do us less harm than our voluntary actions will.
To explain the latter we must take an example of an involuntary action like breathing. In that we can never run out of air in our lungs completely, because we breathe automatically and not through the conscious effort of our will, so we are never in danger of suffocation. Take as another example our eyes. They are protected by eyelids, eyebrows, eyelashes, tear glands, et cetera and cannot be harmed unless we begin straining or abusing them in some conscious way. All of our inner functions are performed involuntarily and would be much worse off if we had anything to say on the matter. Our body adjusts itself in many ways to various conditions and changes in occupation, climate, temperature, altitude, et cetera, without our even noticing it. In this manner, nature takes care of all our involuntary functions without much of our own conscious participation.