Diet: Food makes you healthy and makes you sick

With our diet we have an effective tool at hand to maintain our health.

No matter how different our lives may be, there is one thing we do every day: eat and drink. Each of us eats and drinks more than one and a half tons on average over the course of a year. There’s a great deal of its impact on our well-being that we often don’t realize: “Our food is very important to how we function and how we keep ourselves healthy. We totally underestimate that,” says Maria Fanninger, co-founder of the Earth That Creates Life Society.

significant health risks

“You are what you eat,” says Maria Fanninger, “doesn’t come from anywhere — and it goes to show how much food affects our bodies: “Our body’s cells renew themselves many times in the course of our lives. The basis of this new cellular material is made up of the nutrients we ingest through our food. We, In the true sense of the word, it’s what we eat. That’s why it doesn’t matter what we put in our bodies.”

Just as a balanced diet can keep us healthy, an unbalanced diet, which may also often consist of highly processed foods, increases the risk of various diseases, primarily non-communicable diseases. These include cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease and cancer. They represent our greatest health risk: nearly three-quarters of all deaths worldwide are caused by non-communicable diseases. It is even as high as 90% in Europe.

Maria Fanninger erklärt diesen signifikant hohen Prozentsatz unter anderem mit dem Lebens- und Ernährungsstil unserer westlichen Welt: „Wir essen zu viel vom Falschen und zu wenig vom Richtigen, sind also tendenziell gleichzeitig übergewichtig und unterernährt, weil wir zu viel vom Falschen und zu wenig vom Richtigen, sind also tendenziell gleichzeitig übergewichtig und unterernährt, weil die unserem Körper Kührer he needs. This increases the risk of non-communicable diseases. It is not for nothing that many of these diseases are also called “diseases of civilization”: in many cases they are also the result of a certain way of life.

Food can serve the body

This, too, has a crucial advantage, says Maria Fanninger. Because unlike other factors such as physical conditions or environmental influences, which can also lead to NCDs, we can consciously choose our food. “Only we decide if our food keeps us healthy or makes us sick. That’s why we must also think consciously about what is on our plate.”