Natural Does Not Always Mean Best
I’m a fairly healthy person and so I don’t visit my doctor very often. But when I do, she likes to give me these pieces of paper with lots of boxes checked off. She calls them “requisitions for blood work”. I like to put them in my “important papers” file on my fridge.
At my last doctor’s visit, though, she told me that she would prefer that I take the requisition off of my fridge and march myself down to the lab. After waiting just four and a half months, I took her advice.
According to this requisition I was supposed to refrain from eating or drinking for twelve hours before they poked me. But when I got to the lab, they said that not only were they going to draw blood, I was going to have to pee in a cup–after not drinking for twelve hours.
I dutifully went and tried to comply, with the water running and a picture of Niagara Falls on my iPhone, hoping for inspiration. Thankfully it struck.
The next day the doctor called and was ever so sorry to inform me that I was rather anemic. Personally, I was ecstatic. There’s nothing horribly wrong with me that would cause it; I simply need to eat more beef and pop a pill. I was worried I was getting lazy because I was so tired all the time. Now I know it’s not my fault. In the broad scheme of things, being a little anemic isn’t nearly as bad as what many people are walking through.
Nevertheless, I can’t ignore things my body is telling me. Once you’re on the other side of forty, you can’t eat chocolate cake for breakfast. And so it is that I am starting to pay attention to what I eat. More protein, fewer carbohydrates. More vegetables, less bread. Most of all, I’m trying to eat what comes out of the ground and not what comes out of a can or a box.
Natural makes sense to me when it comes to food, but I do not believe that natural always means best. The ebola virus is natural. SARS is natural. It is natural for 10% of women to die in childbirth, for premature babies not to make it, and for cancer to kill you. Nature is not always kind, and so I find the fanatic devotion to all things natural to be a little strange. Yes, preservatives and mass production have made us obese, but I think obesity is preferable to starvation.
Besides, we also have little babies living longer, most cancer patients being cured, and infection being halted. Bring on the medical advances!
Health decisions should be based on logic, not emotion. If something works, we should be able to prove it works; otherwise it’s just superstition. I believe that eating natural foods is much better than eating from a box. But I also believe that vaccines have helped more people worldwide than almost any other advance. And after being in Kenya and watching people walk over 60 km to get vaccinated, you realize that it’s only here in North America, where death is not always stalking, that we even have the luxury of debating these things. In most of the world, where life is totally “natural”, and germs lurk in what little water there is, people are doing everything they can to get to a clinic to obtain some of our often derided medical advances.
I’m on that other side of forty. I have to start caring for my body more, and that will include more natural things. But it will not only include natural things, because science has a lot to offer. Let’s take the best of both of worlds, and not pretend that it’s an all or nothing proposition.
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