| Search Sensei Talks |
|
|
| Labels |
|
|
|
| Monday, October 06, 2008 |
| Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone… |
Another generation has ‘discovered’ and is delighting in the bounty of healthy, thoughtful, home cooked meals. We’ve learned to take pride in local ingredients, trust the safety of foods our neighbors have grown, and appreciate that delicious, fresh food can help us lower health risks and our weight. Knowledgeable sources like Josee have long urged us to adopt a healthy, ‘traditional’ way of eating known as the “Mediterranean Diet.”
A very different phenomenon is happening in the “birthplace of the famously healthful Mediterranean diet.” A way of life, “associated with longer life spans and lower rates of heart disease and cancer, is in retreat in its home region. The spread of supermarkets and, especially, convenience foods,” as well as “advertising geared toward children has invaded Greece in full force.” This has created an upheaval in the tastes, waists, habits and health of children in Greece. Dr. Michalis Stagourakis, practicing in western Crete, “has seen a transformation of his pediatric practice here over the past three years. A changing diet has produced an epidemic of obesity and related maladies such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol” in the children he cares for.
The Greek government “has begun visiting schools in villages annually for the past few years to weigh children and lecture them on nutrition. The lessons include a food pyramid focused on the Mediterranean diet. This spring, a majority of children tested in Kissamos, a town of 3,000 residents, were found to have high cholesterol. Instead of grades, the moms were comparing cholesterol levels.”
“The government, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations” found that a way of life, as natural as it was healthy, adopted by other nations for its delicious, simple cuisine, “had decayed into a moribund state. It’s almost a perfect diet, but when we looked into what people were eating we noticed that much of the highly praised diet didn’t exist anymore.” It had to be recreated by the Greek Health Ministry, in a chart ordered by the government to teach school children from its homeland the basics.
Their parents have also fallen under the spell, but “unlike in the United States, where obesity is more pronounced in adults than in children, in the Mediterranean region the rise in weight problems has been more common among the young.” In 2002, 31 percent of 12 year olds in Greece were overweight. A 212 percent increase since 1982” The percentage keeps climbing. Now you see kids whose longevity is less than their parents. That’s really scaring people. This is a place where you’d see people who lived to 100, where people were all fit and trim.”
Parents, Doctors, World Health Officials, and United Nations experts find that the healthy life style and “almost perfect diet” of past generations…has been replaced in big cities and “small towns by chocolate shops, pizza places, ice cream parlors, soda machines and fast-food joints. Two- thirds of children are now overweight and the health effects are mounting.”
Parents lament the loss of a way of life, “recalling breakfasts of goat milk, bread and honey,” and style of eating, “we ate what we grew, and what we could make from it.” Their children snack on “ice cream cones”, and “prefer cornflakes in the morning and steak or macaroni and cheese for dinner.”
“They’ve paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.”
- Nancy
Labels: healthy eating, Healthy Planet, Nancy
|
posted by The Sensei Team @ Monday, October 06, 2008   |
|
-->
add to del.icio.us
|
|
|
|
|
|
