| Why Should I Eat My Greens? |
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| Terry Didcott | |||
| Thursday, 14 June 2007 | |||
  Sitting quietly at the dinner table as a child with my parents either end and my brothers and sister scattered around me, I remember dolefully eyeing the overcooked squishy looking pile of vegetables, or greens nestled at the far end of my dinner plate. My siblings were similarly staring at what appeared to be some vegetable alien life-form that was about to mobilise and suck the life out of them! Then I made the disastrous mistake of catching my mother’s eye. At that moment, it was she who came to life and bellowed at all of us to stop gawping at them and eat those greens! We’d all look at her with a silent “Why?” expression on our faces, which she’d decipher with a single blink on an eye and respond with a silent, menacing glare that meant there was no further discussion on the topic. Granted, as children of the 1960s, our farmed produce was not the same as the insipid mineral-starved, pesticide cocktail laden, supermarket bland excuses for vegetables that are foisted upon stressed-out, cash starved young families of today. That is if they are lucky enough to have mothers that actually prepare and cook the raw ingredients of a wholesome meal. Far too many children these days survive on a diet made up almost exclusively of pre-packaged, pre-prepared, microwave-ready meals, chip “butties” made with white bread, burgers, pizza or other soulless, bland, nutrition-starved junk food with no greens or vegetables anywhere in sight. Add to that the crisps, cakes, biscuits and chocolate which are washed down with sugary, fizzy canned drinks. Or if they are really unlucky, they’ll be given chemical laden “diet” drinks by parents concerned that their little darlings are putting on too much weight! And they wonder why obesity rates amongst children are the highest ever in human history! Where did we go wrong? Well, as a race, humankind is only responding to the immense power of a media machine that knows no limits when it comes to advertising. The sheer power of television as an advertising medium is a topic for a whole brace of separate articles. Suffice it to say, that the advertisers have wrapped modern man around their proverbial little fingers and sold us down the river to an early death caused by food that we don’t need, isn’t good for us and will ultimately be the deciding factor in our collective early demise. Which brings us back to the dinner table. So what we can do to reverse that slippery slide into an early outsized grave. Well, if we are old enough to remember dinnertimes like mine, then the seeds for good health were already set by our mothers who, without realising it at the time, were doing us the biggest favour of our lives by making us eat up our greens. You see, that disgusting looking pile of stewed mush that mum called greens contained all the building blocks a young body needed to nourish a strong immune system, healthy cells, healthy organs, growing muscle, bone and skin as well as a healthy brain. Our bodies were conditioned to respond positively to the right nourishment by protecting us in later life from the ravages of modern diseases such as osteoporosis (brittle bones), certain cancers (assuming we didn’t fall onto the junk food bandwagon) and other degenerative diseases that a strong body, nurtured from an early age has the ability to fight off. So if you are a concerned parent reading this and you currently feed your children on some of the horrors already described, it’s time to change. You will do them a service more important than any other in their lives by ditching the junk and starting to prepare good, balanced, wholesome meals from real ingredients like fresh meat and vegetables and those all important greens. You can then finish their meal off with fresh fruit instead of preservative laden sweet puddings. Or make your own puddings using knowledge that used to be handed down from mother to daughter using only wholesome ingredients. Not only will you be giving your children a healthy head start in life, you may well find the behaviour of unruly children settles down once you remove the preservative and artificial colour and flavour filled goodies from their diets (that includes fizzy drinks). That is no idle boast but is backed by scientific fact. So parents, cook for your children and watch them grow up healthy. Eat your own greens and make sure they eat theirs. Our mothers weren’t stupid – they knew something that modern mothers seem to have forgotten thanks to television advertising. That eating your greens is good for you.
Disclaimer: Harmonious Living is written for and read by a community of individuals with strong and independent opinions. While the publishers of Harmonious Living are dedicated to providing a forum in which views can be openly expressed, those views do not necessarily reflect those of the publishers.
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