Turnover

Billions of cells are replaced in the body each day. The quality of the food we eat determines how healthy these new cells are – do they have the right amounts of amino acids and healthy fats to optimise them for their function? When we choose to eat highly processed foods without consideration of their nutritional quality, we are in danger of becoming obese caricatures of humanity – overfed and undernourished. Economists, when considering the most cost-effective time to address environmental problems, introduced the terms ‘time-preference’ and ‘discounting the future’. They believe that, in a market-driven society, choosing when to own something is as important as choosing what to own. Plastic trays of food, wrapped in cling film, are cheap to produce and are quickly thrown in the supermarket trolley. Maybe 50 years later a seabird chokes on a lump of plastic discarded when it seemed preferable to discount the future, so that convenience foods have become convenience lives. In a bizarre game of musical chairs, where the rate of species loss is accelerating, we continue to ‘shit our nest’ believing we will be the winners when the music of Wall Street stops. Nature has no waste. The only species of wasters on this planet are human. Millions of people die around the planet each year and millions of infants are born to replace them. Sadly, our poisoned commons has degraded the environment so that optimum nutrition, both physically and spiritually, is increasingly difficult to find. Discounting the future has produced generations of dog-eat-dog consumers clutching I-Phones from 18 months and believing that a Ronald McDonald ‘Happy Meal’ will satisfy our needs. It seems that, as we’ve been hurtling down the road to hell, we missed the turn off to sanity. From the start we called ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ MAD yet somehow we’ve convinced ourselves we’re too clever to destroy ourselves because so far we’ve avoided thermonuclear war. Death is death irrespective of which horseman delivers it. Let’s awaken from this nightmare and return to love. We can replace our greed with a child-feed-child innocence. Let us honour the diversity of nature and expand our curiosity as we explore a science of synergy rather than exploitation. Let’s ensure that humankind evolves by having cosmic consciousness direct our choices toward a right use of resources. Healthy living is a holistic choice. We must have spiritual awareness and be mentally healthy in order to make good physical choices. Billions of cells must continue to change and a healthy turnover is part of the human condition. But as older generations pass on the baton to the young, it’s only fair that we also leave them a track to run on.