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No Cheating
The
media and thousands of food companies have convinced the public that it is
possible to be a healthy person and to obtain all necessary nutrients from a
few little trick foods and products.
However, the statistics they use to back up their data are almost always
misleading and flawed, and therefore shouldn’t be blindly believed. Three examples of this I will discuss are
hand sanitizers, multivitamins, and cereal.
First
of all, hand sanitizers, for all we know, could lead to the extinction of
mankind. Some people use hand sanitizer
in a religious manner, believing that all of the germs on their hands will
magically die and not be a threat to them.
This is definitely not the case.
Although most hand sanitizers claim to kill 99.99% of germs, in reality,
they only kill about 30-40% at their peak performance. Also, since bacteria reproduce so quickly and
easily, the few individual bacteria that are resistant to the active ingredient
in the hand sanitizer will thrive, and we will soon have billions of bacteria
on our hands against which our sacred hand sanitizer is useless. This concept also applies to the overuse of
antibiotics, so within the next 20-30 years, we may have no way to fight
against an epidemic, as all of our drugs have been rendered worthless by our
abuse of them.
Secondly,
multivitamins aren’t really all that they are cracked up to be. While they technically contain much more of
our vital nutrients than we need per day, we don’t know enough about how these
nutrients and vitamins are absorbed into the body to determine whether or not
we are actually getting the benefit.
Therefore, as Sheldon in the Big Bang Theory says, we may be just paying
for a lot of very expensive urine!
Lastly,
cereal. While dozens of cereal brands
boast that they contain 12+ essential vitamins and minerals, the reality is
that these too cannot be used by the body.
For example, a given cereal brand may claim to contain 200% daily value
of iron. However, this iron comes from
metal shavings that are mixed into the cereal, and this form of iron cannot be
absorbed and used by the body.
Therefore, this iron is just transported out of our body, with no
benefit to us.
In
conclusion, there is no way to cheat nature in this regard, and the only way to
stay healthy and obtain all the needed nutrients is to eat a balanced diet with
plenty of fruits and vegetables and to exercise regularly, as our ancestors
have been doing for tens of thousands of years.
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