Health Care vs Illness Care

We should start naming things as they really are, not what someone would like us to believe. What we really have is Illness Care, NOT Health Care. Very little money is ever spent to promote "Health Care" because Health is NOT profitable.

The human body is extremely complex, and we have hundreds of thousands of internal interactions going on at any given moment from our 400 hundred trillion cells. Those interactions are also interdependent, and although our bodies have the ability to fabricate some of the components, we still need some raw materials for manufacturing them.

Jump rope, Photo from tedkerwin

For a different picture for understanding, think about the group children's game we call jump rope; when typically done by 3 or more children it's called long rope jumping. If you have 3 children and a rope, you can play. Remove any one component, and there's no game. 2 children and a rope but no jumper... no game. 3 children and no rope, no game.

Micronutrients (meaning we don't need much of them) like the fat-soluble vitamins have a 'game' (interaction) going on in our bodies too, and if any one of them is MIA, the 'game' suffers. Please note that these essential fat-soluble vitamins can only be dissolved in saturated fats in the body (hence their name). A healthy liver will store any excess, unlike the water-soluble vitamins which we rapidly excrete in urine. 

Photo by Public Domain Photos

Photo by julesjulesjules m

Vitamin A (egg yolks, liver, whole milk, cheese) is needed for eyesight, in other words "essential for the neural transmission of light into vision". All the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) need a bit of all the others to function (play the game) properly.

I find it interesting that the amount of Vitamin A in egg yolks in the Netherlands is more than twice the amount in the US. I wonder why? What they are fed (non-GMO?) and how they are raised? Curious. source

Photo by Peber the Swede

Photo by andrewmalone

Vitamin D (from sunlight, or oily fish like herring, salmon and sardines) helps the body absorb and use calcium, but you also need to ingest enough of the right kind of calcium for it to work... and then it takes Vitamin A to make the interaction work, too. (Vitamin A binds the Vitamin D receptors). Likewise if you take calcium supplements but don't get enough A or D, the calcium is useless.

Gluten-free (coconut flour) Fried Oysters, by NourishingCook

Oysters Rockefeller, photo by Argyleist

For Vitamin D to work, it also needs the minerals magnesium (green vegetables, nuts, whole grains), zinc (oysters, wheat germ, liver) and boron (green vegetables, fruit, nuts). The other catch is you also need enough Vitamin K (green leafy vegetables) to regulate the entire fat-soluble system.

The fat-soluble vitamins (except E) come from the very animal foods the "health care" industry tells us to reduce or avoid altogether: eggs, butter, and organ meats like liver. (BTW, coconut oil is considered a good saturated fat but contains almost zero vitamins and minerals. The main benefit in coconut oil is the Lauric Acid content, which promotes the "good" cholesterol, HDL.) 

There are many, many other nutrients which are equally essential for good health, and our bodies can utilize them all much better in the form of real food rather than supplements. However, just like the fat-soluble vitamins, most are interdependent on a host of others for maximum nutritional function. Who tells or teaches us that??

It seems the best way to have real health care is in our own hands. If we don't take responsibility for ourselves and our health, who will??

Try this: On your own, research some foods for their nutritional amounts. Research your own nutritional needs for the foods that supply them. If the information comes from research, find out who paid for the research; it is too often biased. Look for the sin of omission, where they tell us the part they want us to know rather than the whole picture.

The spin on many industrialized foods now being promoted as "healthy" is just that: spin. I have to be vigilant about reading labels on foods. A package of crackers I picked up in the natural foods market last weekend had huge advertising all over the front of the box exclaiming "Now made with whole grains!". When I read the label, sure enough there were whole grains... but last on the list just before the chemicals (labels are required by law to list ingredients in descending order of the quantity). The first ingredient was "enriched white flour"... I put it back on the shelf. Deceptive advertising, in my opinion.

Getting and staying healthier is much harder when the truth is so hard to find amongst all the hype. In my opinion, food labels should also list ALL the vitamin amounts, as well as all the herbicides, pesticides, irradiation and chemical washes the food has endured.

I repeat: It seems the best way to have real health care is in our own hands. If we don't take responsibility for ourselves and our health, who will??