Let thy food be thy medicine

"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food."

-Hippocrates

I find it ironic that one of the greatest quotes that was ever said about food was said long before modern medicine was ever around. (However this was also long before a lot of health related research was around, so people lived mainly off of meat and potatoes and wine. Boo). But these days, despite that we do live longer then people did in Hippocrates day, we seemed to be more unhealthy, more overweight, and sick all the time. With the advances in modern medicine don't you think that we should be getting healthier, not sicker? So what are we doing wrong. 

We live in a world where we love our problems to be covered by band aids. Anytime my 5 year old does anything to harm himself he immediately wants a band aid, despite if he is bleeding and is in actual need of one. If he has any sort of bump or bruise or scrap, he insists on getting a band aid. Unfortunately for him, i'm always up for teaching a life lesson to my little baby, so he only gets one if he REALLY needs one. He always learns to deal with it, and the pain from the boo boo will go away weather he has been bandaged up or not. 

<- But it's so hard to resist this face sometimes!!

Modern medicine in the majority of ways that it is being used, is simply just a band aid to cover up a bad feeling that we don't want to deal with. But as a society that is what we want. If we get a cold, we pump ourselves with Tylenol. At the first sign of a headache we reach for the Aspirin. Any time we get a pain in our body we run to the Dr. demanding to find out what is wrong with us and insisting that there is some magic pill that can make it better. Does Tylenol make the cold go away? No, it just masks the pain that we feel so we can get by until it does. We don't realize that the cold is going to go away in the same amount of time, even if we don't pump ourselves with the medicine.  

Anytime that I feel the slight inkling of a cold, or if I am in a situation where I am more susceptible to get one, like on a plane or bus ride, I take a vitamin C pill (the all natural God given cold medicine), eat oranges, drink tea and wash my hands A LOT, but NEVER do I take medicine. And 95% of the time I have beaten it by the very next day. Our bodies are strong, amazingly resilient and will always be there for us and bounce back and fight, but we have to be there for them as well. We have to stop forgetting about quick fixes and magic pills and starting eating right, drinking right, and moving right.

So lets use the blueberry as a wonderful example of how to do this. According to /www.blueberrycouncil.org (a whole counsel just for blueberries!) blue berries contain tons of antioxidants  which 

"work to neutralize free radicals — unstable molecules linked to the development of cancer, cardiovascular disease and other age-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s" 

Cardiovascular disease and cancer, two of the leading causes of death in our nation. So with this information out there and with food being so accessible, why would you rather wait till you get cancer, and then pump your body full for painful hazardous life threatening chemotherapy instead of just giving blueberries a shot and eating a handful of them every day. No, of course it doesn't mean you WONT get cancer, but heck, i'll do everything in my power to prevent it if I can. Not to mention helping out against alzheimer's AND causing your skin to age much less quickly. It really sounds too good to be true. (But its not!)

Blueberries are just one of the MANY amazing foods that God has given us to protect ourselves and take care of ourselves on our own. Eating some of these in combination with many others that are out there IS. THE. KEY. to feeling better, weighing less, preventing headaches and colds, and so many other things that people just cant seem to find the answer too. It IS just that easy. 

So the next time your sitting on the couch eating chips and thinking about the "secret to all these skinny healthy happy people." Go for a walk and munch on some blueberries while you think.