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DIET AND LIFESTYLE --- THE HEALTH OF THE PEOPLE
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
While attending the December general meeting of The Barrie and District Hunters and Anglers, our local Conservation Club, a long-time conservation associate and friend came up to me and said: “I was raised on a farm near Simcoe, Ontario and you were raised on a farm on the Bruce Peninsula. Do you realize that nearly everything we ate back then was organic?” I was briefly at a loss for words! I had given some thought, and have done some preaching, about free-range livestock, and how the flavour of such produce far exceeds similar produce purchased at the supermarket today. What struck me were the words “nearly everything”. A high percentage of my diet during my youth was raised or grown right there on the family farm---beef, pork, poultry, all manner of vegetables and fruit. Potatoes, turnips, beets, carrots, cabbages and onions were stored over winter months in cool cellars and bins. Mother canned all manner of pickles, relishes, vegetables and fruits---even meat on occasion. Dad made a large crock of sauerkraut in the kitchen beside the woodstove---us kids attentively watching the process and helping out when we got older. I think that sauerkraut making apparatus, and a stoneware crock or two, may still be down in the cellar at the farm. We butchered, right there on the farm, at least one cattle beast every year. Add to that two or three hogs and quite a number of chickens. We got blood on us and we got dirty on a regular basis. Dirty enough for our bodies to build up a high level of immunity to a lot of the diseases that are now showing up with increasing frequency among younger generations.Strong evidence of our earlier organic lifestyle, and of little concern to us at the time, was the amount of garbage we generated. Anything that could be burned was burned, either in the woodstove or a bonfire. We did not burn plastics or Styrofoam because these where virtually unheard back then. But newspaper, cardboard boxes and paper bags---yes, groceries came in brown paper bags; wrapping paper---yes, meat came wrapped up in “freezer paper”. All of these were burned in the wood stove that heated our house. We stored empty tin cans and glass bottles in a couple of old washtubs that sat some distance outside the back door under a gooseberry bush. It took about a year to fill up those two tubs with cans and bottles. To put it all in perspective, each of those washtubs was about twice the size of your standard blue box of today. I currently fill up three blue boxes every two weeks---mostly plastic, tin cans, and very few glass containers. I also fill up at least one blue box each week with newspaper, cardboard and Styrofoam.
Plastics are the big culprits in refuse generation. The first plastics that I recall contained liquid dish washing and laundry detergents. These were heavy, thick-walled, usually opaque bottles. The predominant plastic bottle is now a clear, thin-walled vessel. A considerable amount of wrapping these days involves clear plastics and Styrofoam. The generation of garbage aside, could it be that this predominance of plastic and Styrofoam has something to do with rising cancer rates and other more recent, sometimes surprising, health issues?
When I look at photographs of preceding generations I rarely see a fat person. Pictures of my father and mother, their siblings and their friends, then in their late teens or early twenties, show well-dressed folk, their clothes hanging on fat-free frames. In fact, a lot of those distinguished characters look half-starved. I doubt they were! They were just the victims of a lot of exercise through hard physical labour! Come to think of it, during my time at public and high school I remember very, very few students that one would consider fat; maybe one in every fifty students. Again, a lot of time spent outdoors at work and play was the cause. A lot of fresh air and dirt contributed to the making of a healthy populace. This was a far cry from this age of lethargy; the result of too much time spent indoors with the TV, video games, a plethora of audio gimmicks and the personal computer.
Getting dirty was a by-product of outdoor work and play. Today, there are phobias about cleanliness and sanitation. Cleanliness was always next to Godliness, according to my grandmother; but it had its time and place. Advertising in the visual media has a real knack for depicting germs as horrid looking creepy crawlies, every one of them out to infect and kill you. No wonder there is a penchant for over-sanitation, especially among the naive and uninformed. There are a lot of good, even life-sustaining, bacteria and micro-organisms out there. Is over-sanitation doing us more harm than good?
What does all this have to do with food allergies, higher incidences of diabetes, asthma and things like Attention Deficit Disorder and Autism? Food allergies were virtually unheard of in my dirty, plastic free youth. ADD, if it existed, was known simply as a short attention span. This was usually quickly cured with a little discipline, stern guidance and hard work. It was not something invented by psychologists to further their goals of self-determination.
During the earlier part of my youth, say pre-school almost through high school, I knew of only three people that died of cancer. Now every third or fourth person has it! It could be argued that discovery and diagnosis was lacking back then, but even so, the incidence of cancer was considerably lower.
Those changes in diet, lifestyle and packaging materials over the last 40 years have no doubt had a negative impact on the health of the people. They have also had a negative impact on the health of the environment. From as basic as far fewer people spending quality time in the outdoors and subsequently not being personally apprised or appreciative of nature and ecological issues: to the increasing volume of garbage, synthetics and toxins that mother nature now has to deal with, the health of the land is a true reflection on the health of the people; and vice versa.
I was born on the Bruce Peninsula on July 20, 1951 and raised on a farm just south of the village of Lions Head, which is located about halfway up the peninsula on the Georgian Bay shoreline. I graduated from Georgian College of Applied Arts and Technology in Barrie in 1973 as a Resources Engineering Technologist. I was hired by Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) in April of 1975 as the first DUC employee in Ontario. Throughout almost 29 years I was involved with the implementation of more than 500 wetland projects and project complexes in southwestern and south central Ontario. Some of these habitat projects included important waterfowl and migratory bird habitat along the eastern shoreline of Lake St. Clair. Just three weeks short of completing 29 years with DUC, I accepted an early retirement opportunity effective March 31, 2004.
