Health

by Louis Cox and Ruah Swennerfelt

Good health is such an unquantifiable, moving target that it's hard to go beyond saying that we're strongly in favor of it and are grateful for the generous measure we both have been given. It's really a matter of understanding some of the general conditions that Mother Nature has established for good health and trying to adjust our lifestyles accordingly, without demanding guarantees.

Trying to put this in the context of Peace for Earth we can share our belief that staying personally healthy requires a healthy planet. One of the most significant insights to come out of the modern ecology movement is the realization that the earth, Gaia, is a single living super-organism. It breathes through its amosphere and processes nutrients in its bloodstream, the oceans. Industrial society has been dumping toxic wastes into this delicately balanced system to a degree that we would not stand for if it were our bodies they were experimenting with and exploiting.

That suggests a beginning principle: To increase our odds for good health and long life, we try to treat our bodies the way we believe Nature "designed" them to be treated. Humans need extended periods of strenuous exercise, but most people today limit themselves to shuffling from the couch to the refrigerator or table, then to the elevator, car, or riding lawn mower. And they wonder why they keep getting weaker and flabbier. We have inherited some of the same bad habits of soft living from our culture, but we are trying to overcome these habits by minimizing the amount of machinery we employ in physical work. For example, we groom our small lawn with a non-motorized reel mower, and do most other yard and garden chores with hand tools. We walk a mile each day to get the newspaoer and mail, and we take three- or four-mile walks and 10-mile bike trips for exercise. As we train for the Peace for Earth Walk, we are going to be scheduling longer and longer walks with progressively heavier loads. All this fitness we get without having to shell out an annual membership fee for a health club!

We also act on the realization that our bodies simply are not made to handle the kinds of refined foods, laced with artificial flavoring, colors, and preservatives, that most people today have come to prefer. Our jaws and teeth are made for vigorous cutting and grinding, and our digestive tracts were made to process lots of roughage daily. Our bloodstreams are made to break down the complex organic molecules found in whole foods into compounds that our cells specifically require. When we go against this principle, we invite all kinds of discomforts, diseases, and disabilities, from head to toe.

Since we can't grow all of our own food, keeping harmful substances out of our diets poses quite a challenge. We are increasingly concerned about the many persistent synthetic chemicals are in our processed foods, our air, the water, and the soils. We do our best to be informed about news of threatening substances in our environment and to take appropriate action. We know now not to microwave food in plastic containers. We rid house of certain kinds of plastic water bottles, and we no longer purchase canned goods due to the plastic lining bisphenyl-A in most cans. Also from what we’ve been learning about indoor airborne pollutants, we have switched to vacuum cleaner bags that are micro filters that trap more of these pollutants than the old fashioned bags.

For us, keeping healthy has a political dimension as well. We are part of a regional "localvore" movement that is trying to take back control of the quality and sources of our food. There are also legislative fronts that we are active on, from genetic engineering to acid rain to regulation of the burgeoning organic foods industry.

Finally, we recognize a sense in which good health is psychological, because the old idea of a split between mind and body has been debunked. That's why healthy people tend to be those with positive outlooks, who laugh a lot, and who practice what some call prayer. (We have learned a lot about this from some neighbors who run the To-Do Institute.) These mental attributes work well in partnership with such time-tested advice as slowing down, chewing thoroughly, taking most things in moderation, having an annual physical, and getting enough sleep. •

My own prescription for health is less paperwork and more running barefoot through the grass. 

—Leslie Grimutter