If Eating Makes You Fat and Sugar Makes Occasions Sweet, Then What About Greens?

ur visual sense is so strong that it often dominates our other senses, and often our intellects. "Seeing is believing". Pastries look good. It’s also hard to believe what we don’t see. We didn’t see the effects of air and water pollution, or global warming, until recently. We don’t (yet) see the effects of loading our space with electromagnetic waves (phones, wireless internet, etc); and therefore they are OK!?

And yet, our modern life is really built on things we don’t see. We will never see electrons; and yet they run our homes, our computers, even our bodies. Our longer life expectancies are mostly due to the discovery of bacteria and viruses that we barely can see (and the Austrian doctor who first made this discovery, Semmelweis, was laughed into insanity). Galileo was locked up the second half of his life by the Catholic Church for proving that the sun does not go around the earth, though it appeared so. And what about everyone who was certain that Columbus would fall off the edge of the earth? Each time a packed aircraft is lifted off the ground by the air that we do not see, we have evidence that our sensory systems are limited.

This tendency has applied to our foods. Milk is white and therefore has calcium. Food that is fatty (meats, nuts, egg yolks) make us fat. We see the TV commercials that show the fat building up in our arteries, as if what we put in our mouth goes directly into our blood streams.

There are times when we are not fooled by our visual sense. We have learned to trust science when we board our planes or wash our hands. We are afraid of unseen radiation, and infection with HIV. While our senses remains powerful, our intellect can be utilized to re-interpret what our sensory systems tell us are there or not.

Our auditory system is also quite powerful and is manipulated to get us to accept, or reject certain ideas. The "sound bite" on the news sways our perception of what is true. "A lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth". Music’s effect on our emotions gives us a clue as to how powerfully these sensory systems are hard-wired into our emotions, thought, belief, and ultimately action.

One can think of our sensory systems similar to a TV; where images are projected onto the screen of our mind. However, the process of creating that illusion alters reality, and was never designed to tell us everything about reality, anyway. Looking at our senses from an evolutionary point-of-view, their purpose is to enable our survival and procreation by giving us information about our external (visual and auditory) environment, our surface (skin), how we are moving, and how we are functioning on the inside (pain, other bodily sensations). As we evolved further, we developed intellect to enable us to utilize these senses to deal and plan survival in a variety of environments. Language developed in part to communicate this information to our species and children, who, unlike other mammals that are independent at birth, are designed to depend upon us for years so we can teach them how to interpret their senses and their environment for survival.

And so, when we are presented with information of any sort, we need to use our intellect to ask the critical questions: 1) what is the reliability of the information, 2) what is the purpose of the information, 3) what other information is not provided or not yet available, and 4) are our sensory systems being fooled? As Plato demonstrated over 2000 years ago, at the best, our senses can only show us shadows of what is real. We must use our intellect to extrapolate truth from these shadows.

Oh, and to answer the question: Green foods, especially the greens in grasses, leaves and algae, provide calcium, magnesium, other minerals and essential oils to land and water animals. When organic, varied, and properly stored and prepared, they bring us the best quality nutrition—virtually every nutritional philosophy agrees to this truth. It is where we are most deficient, and where we must return.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This general information should not be used to make decisions about medical care without the involvement of a knowledgeable prac-titioner.