Eating For Life

As a matter of course, all responsible persons should take the time to educate themselves, and their children, about the benefits of healthy eating. Learning to eat for life in a health conscious way is one of the best guarantees for a long and fulfilling life. The quality of our lives is as important as the quantity to most individuals, but because of debilitating disease, we are often forced to make a decision and choose between quality and quantity.

Thanks to the advances in modern medicine, the average person's life span now exceeds seventy years. If you stop to think, that's quite a long time to walk around on this earth. Along with the wonderful life expectancy increases, however have the detrimental effects of overeating and unhealthy eating. It seems that as we advance in one area, we regress in others.

As we set out on the course of life, from birth to death, eating is a constant. We eat to sustain life to our bodies, and maintain optimal health as babies. As we grow older, we eat because we enjoy the food we are consuming. This is where the equation has become somewhat skewed. We are supposed to eat because we need the nourishment, and hopefully enjoy the food as we consume it. Not consume it just because we enjoy the food, with little regard to our need for nourishment.

Eating for life is a concept that should never have needed invention, however, here we are. Learning about healthy choices, caloric needs, vitamin needs, and how to make the best choice in order to accommodate all needs, requires some education.

Many children reach adulthood with no thought being given at all to the most important conscious action we have: eating. There is no room for food education in our school system; we're too busy with mathematics and science. Home economics classes, that were once a part of the required curriculum, are now optional and very few students are exposed to the notional education found in that class.

Health is taught as a science course, and addresses matters of personal hygiene, diseases, and the broad spectrum of health as it applies to the masses. No individual attention is given to how to attain optimal health via our eating habits. It's funny that we skip the most important, fundamental building block to good health: our notional and caloric consumption in our food. I personally believe we should have the field of neutrino and physical activity married into something combined to provide every person that enters the school system with a personal knowledge of their bodies' needs, caloric, and nutritional, so that they complete their education with mental and physical competencies.

For now, we simply wait until our children have reached unhealthy, obese weights, and then put them through the painful process of trying to regain their physical health, and restrict their eating. Don't you think it would have been much easier to simply have prevented this problem, and taught them good physical fitness and good eating habits?

Eating for life is a concept that should be as important to our educational process as our ability to count. The ability to recognize our nutritional requirements, find the foods we need to fulfill those requirements, and differentiate between healthy food consumption and "unhealthy" eating habits is not an option. Not for a healthy, happy, long, and quality life.