The Hamburger-Coffee Man
We all basically know or feel that we should eat a variety of food and not one food over and over again. It’s our body that tells us.
Our body needs a great variety of food, it wants constant change in our nutritional habits, and I believe this is very important for good health.
It feels no good to always eat the same.
A case discussed by the great American-Jewish vegan theorist Rabbi Dr. Gabriel Cousens comes to mind about a young American office worker who was eating only Hamburgers and drank only coffee?
This man turned schizophrenic. Contrary to practicing physicians who treated this case (wrongly), Dr. Cousens found out that the man was not eating ‘stupid’ because of schizophrenia but that his poor eating habits actually had caused the mental illness. This was a revolutionary insight at the time, back in the 1970s when this case was presented to the medical community in America.
How are you eating, how great is the variety we need in our food consumption habits?
The case of this man shows quite dramatically that not only physical but also mental health depends on variation in our nutritional habits. It can be deadly to always eat the same.
I have also found out that people who are non-demanding in matters of food, are non-demanding intellectually, in simpler words, the more stupid people are, the more they are un-inquiring nutritionally. By the same token, all intelligent people I met have in common that they are highly requiring in matters of nutrition, that is, they want to constantly explore new food avenues, and they are also interested in many different national cuisines. It is a matter of wellbeing!
This being said, be careful with so-called fad diets. They are making a lot of money but they are also rendering a lot of people sick, especially in America. Diets have that nasty habit to be exclusive about certain foods and draconically against certain other foods. That is unnatural and forces the body into a mental groove that gets the body out of balance in most cases.
With all the dreadful amount of diets and their inevitable side effects, people seem to overlook that our body is a very wistful advisor: it tells us what it wants by being selective about food, but also by being highly requiring about *different* food. Today I long for this, tomorrow for that, and after-tomorrow for something else again. Behold, this is healthy! And it is healthy to follow your body’s food-selective fancies and hunches: they are vital for your wellbeing! They are also vital for your creativity and the development of your intelligence.
Be food-selective, not because you follow a certain doctrine, be it a healthy one like veganism, but because you give your body the priority to select, not your mind, worse any ‘authorities’ in matters of food who tell you what to eat and what not. However, for the body being in state to be sensitive enough to make the right choices, the body must be in a healthy condition: a body that weighs 300 pounds and gets stuffed with junk food on a daily basis is not in that sensitive condition any longer to make those choices. It will make wrong choices, which are choices based upon cravings. Food cravings are the number one cause for obesity and diabetes, according to recent research conducted in America and India. When the body has lost its fine selectiveness it becomes a dull consuming machine that is basically non-discriminative, that is, it will choose foods that are ‘fashionable’ and only those foods, that is, in most cases, what is promoted by food marketing (red meats, hamburgers, potatoes, heavy legumes, processed foods, lots of wheat and wheat-derivatives, lots of corn, and corn-derivatives, lots of sugar, lots of coffee, and lots of sweets).
Once you have detoxified your body, you can start listening to your body for your food choices. How is in charge, in this case, your mental, rational, intellectual mind? No. It is your body, which has its own wisdom, its own intelligence, and its own sanity! You can count on it.
