In the Name of Health - SuperFoods

Now I know everything God made may be considered a super food – barring the list of food items He did not recommend for His chosen Biblical race, the Israelites. For those of you who are wondering, such delicacies as lobsters and crabs did not make God’s list of super foods…  He did use a curious identification method for ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ foods such as divided hooves and chewing cud, (clean) marine life with fins and scales (clean), insects that fly and swarm (unclean) etc, but bottomline, if it scavenged, was carnivorous, dead, or generally looked ugly…, it was unclean. If it was well tamed, beautiful and had no dodgy habits… clean.

You’ll be glad to know that, contrary to all the debate, He never quite forbid wine in its entirety except for those specially chosen saints like the Nazirites… oh, and the Bishops! So do watch out. But before you go get your crate of the stuff, neither did He encourage it. What with such sayings like ‘give wine to the perishing…’ ouch! What He did clearly say, over and over, is that drunkenness is a sin that will land you in hell…. So go figure…! Wine bibbing for the God-conscious is a delicate balancing act so intricate as to be left well alone, for the most part…enough said.

So then some of today’s ‘super foods’ would never have found their way into God’s list, rather languishing in the list of the ‘forbidden’. Luckily for today’s generation God did give reprieve when He said to Peter up on the roof, ‘don’t call unclean what God has made clean.’ Thus declaring all foods clean. Still, go easy on that ‘all foods clean thing’. Clean spiritually may not necessarily mean clean for your health or stomach, what with all that fat, alcohol, toxins, cholesterol, sugars, salts… I think what God did here was to give us a choice as to what to eat, rather than a clean bill of health on all foods. So to exercise wisdom and caution, as opposed to following a set of rules…

Now back to our super foods… If you’ve consulted the internet lately you’ll have discovered that list of super foods is growing daily; strawberries, nuts, tomatoes, avocadoes, fish, salmon, olives, spinach and all leaves green, carrots, red meat, red wine, bananas, pumpkins and their seeds, melons and their seeds, sweet potatoes, eggs, milk, chocolate, cacao, herbs, spices, whole grains, whole cereals, have I forgotten something? I’m sure I’ve forgotten something… You get the picture though. Almost everything God made is in there really. 

So why not break it all down and say, any naturally produced food (as opposed to processed and man-made stuff), anything growing naturally in the farm, bushes, pens or grasslands; anything swimming in the ocean that is neither oil nor plastic; anything flying in the air that is no craft or meteor; all these eaten in moderation, are super foods! Mark you even healthy stuff if overdone will stuff your midriff, unless it’s all green or yellow.

Kenya has not been left behind in the super-food craze. Our thing here is mainly to go back to traditional foods which we long abandoned and forgot in our craving for the West’s processed, fine, sugary and fancy looking stuff. Yeah, we even borrowed their crops and forgot our good old millet, sorghum, cassava, yams, sweet potatoes, arrow roots and the like, (in the process borrowing their diseases too). Plus all our original greens that we’re now made to understand are full of iron, antioxidants and all the other goodness we’ve learnt to swear by. 

It seems nowadays all it needs is to grow on its own in a farm, and suddenly it can cure cancer, common cold, asthma, ulcers and all manner of ailments; even HIV Aids!

Now I’m all for natural foods - I too have realized fatigue seems to disappear if we go healthy and natural, but I also know their role is mainly health maintenance and prevention of opportunistic ailments. But once the ailment catches on, for all practical purposes it’s time for some medical attention. Otherwise if food could cure all maladies simply because it was natural, then our ancestors would have lived longer and escaped all the horrible plagues that took so many of them away. What with all their foods having being all natural!

The other day I attempted to explain this to a friend by use of a strange metaphor. I went on and on about how eating healthy can be compared to maintaining peace in a country and ensuring cohesion so that no violence or aggression breaks out, internally or externally. But once aggression strikes, despite all efforts at peace, then it’s time to bring out those trained to handle aggression, the forces that be. Nice words will not do it. You first quell the aggression, then discuss the peace. You could do both at the same time, but you must confront the aggression.

At the end of that comparison my friend incredulously asked me, ‘Are we still talking about garlic?!’ for believe me, all along we had been discussing the health benefits of garlic, another super, super, super food, incidentally…

Still, like in all things, war and disease included, prevention is better than cure, health better than medication, peace better than confrontation. So thumbs up to all foods natural – healthy super-foods, whatever their definition… 

The extreme of this theory – that of eating everything as raw or as near raw as possible, meat and milk included - is just dodgy. Really, we improved on our ancestors by cooking our food so as to kill suspect micro-organisms in there that caused disease and untold suffering. Why go backwards in the name of new research? It’s just a vicious circle that will take us back to the days of microbes and other microscopic monsters.

Don’t even get me started on grass – drinking juice made from all sorts of super-grass to get as near the natural goodness as possible. What is wrong with letting the cow and sheep eat the grass whereupon I eat their flesh and drink their milk thereby taking in whatever nutrients in grass they already stored up for me? But then maybe it’s just me… but I simply don’t think we should be competing with livestock for grass.