health=wealth

Native Californians at the Colorado River, 1848.
Stone engraving by border surveyor Arthur Schott.
Dressed like their Hawai’ian cousins, these buffed
ancestors never went to the gym, dieted or did a
pushup.  The food, exercise and spirit life of the
hunter-gatherer is our evolutionary, hard-wired
highway to health.

Good health is easy

Eat no man made chemicals, additives, poisons or newly invented refined foods.  We don’t have good bodily systems for dealing with and eliminating unknown molecules.  They cause hormonal havoc and mostly get stored away in fat cells.  No sugar, fruit juice, soft drinks.  No white rice, white bread or flower.  Eat these foods in their natural state still attached to fiber.  Enjoy vegetables and fruits of every kind and color, organic if possible.  Eat healthy fats like avocado, olive oil and fish oil.  Eat clean sustainable soy proteins, seafood and meats.  Walk, we are a walking race.  Swim, surf, immerse in ocean wilderness.  Get plenty of safe sex and sleep.  Drink clean alkaline water.  Supplement with vitamins and minerals.  Use your brain, play music, sing, dance, create, explore, seek beauty, fall in love, speak your mind and work hard in short bursts.  Laugh, cry, bathe, breathe.  Embrace life, don’t be afraid.  Become the universe.  Live and die healthy.

Our ancient instincts:  find food, seek sex, curious seeking and anticipation, move, comunicate, fun, rest.
Our strongest natural bonds:  child to mother, mate to mate, tribal/family/friendship, man to animal, man to earth.

 A cautionary tale:  Hawai’i, the sugar industry and surfing

    The one-two-three punch of European diseases: flu, measles, smallpox and syphilis; followed by deforestation of the islands for sugar plantations, then a refined sugar diet, decimated the Hawai’ian race.  Surfing’s resurgence in 20th century Hawaii was crucial to the restoration of the survivors health and pride.
     Discovered in the highlands of New Guinea, sugar was the world’s first great international industry.  19th century sugar mills were the first mechanized factories of the industrial revolution.  Refined sugar was one of the first worldwide chemical-extraction-from-plant scams.  Like heroin and cocaine, it is toxic in pure form.
     Used as a pre-refrigeration era preservative because it is poison to most micro-organisms, sugar has an unlimited shelf life.  Added to cooked fruits and vegetables it made ‘preserving’ in jars possible.  We still call jams preserves.  Sugar kept mold out of the new pastries, sweetbreads and pasta.  It kept baby formula and baby food, still sold in little jars, fresh longer.  It was dense in calories, easy to pack, store and transport, a cheap and easy food substitute.  Sugar could be grown intensively and was perfectly suited to become a model capitalist cheap labor monopoly.  The French were first and sugar soon earned 25% of their national income.  Britain and other countries jumped in to the trade and the rest is candy history.
     We’re addicted to the sticky, body destroying gunk.  But not really.  Refined sugar consumed in excess becomes a blood poison.  It is insulin we are addicted too, the body’s natural feel-good chemical defense that we send to neutralize excess blood sugar.  Insulin is the drug that makes a baby quit crying, not sugar.  And insulin, like most drugs is a blunt tool whose overuse has many well documented side effects. 
     Insulin rushes in to escort sugar from the blood, but it also stops digestion and kills apatite.  As every mother knows, if you eat sugar before a meal, you won’t want your real food.  What she needs to know is that if you have a sugary desert, you won’t digest the real meal you just ate – your body absorbs the instant fuel of sugar too fast.  Insulin spikes, so you store the meal you just ate…as fat.  We’re sticky stucky stuffed.  But that insulin-drugged belly feels good…doesn’t it?  There’s the rub.
     Insulin overdose leads to obesity, diabetes, childhood obesity and diabetes, asthma, hormonal imbalances, depression, mood swings and a host of auto-immune malfunctions.  Bad stuff.
     Sugar rots our teeth which weren’t designed to deal with this powerful chemical…and the modern dental industry was created.
     Sugar is now in almost every canned, packaged or boxed product in your not-so-supermarket.
     Sugar is a scam, suckers.  What’s a sucker made of?  Sugar!  Think about the origin and meanings of the word.  It sucks, don’t it? Sucker sucking suckers!  The plantation owners are still laughing at all of us.
     Quit.  Throw off the sugar blues.  Eat real food. Free Hawai’i from the plague of sugar cane and sugar.  Boycott and bankrupt this island and people-destructive industry.  Take it personally.  Don’t be a sucker.