Healthy Living: From cure to prevention
Those who choose the healthy options reduce pollution, help mitigate global warming, and reduce the burden on health and other services.
Some illnesses are brought on by accidents, injuries, or genetic factors beyond our control, but others are certainly caused or made worse by our lifestyles and what we do.
In the UK, the NHS is working on a ten-year plan for its future. From what I can see, some of the main thrusts of the plan will be prevention rather than cure, healthy living rather than pills, happiness and wellbeing rather than illness.
Three of the main things that make us ill these days are lack of exercise, bad food, and loneliness. For far too many of us, the only exercise we get is walking to the car, and then we complain that the car parks are too far away from where we want to go. To wrap up warm and walk for half an hour, to work, the shops or to school, seems to be beyond us. I love cycling: the wind in your spokes, birdsong in your ears, flying silently on perfect wheels.
Our food is sprayed, force-fed, cruelty-led, shipped in from distant wildlife deserts, plastic-wrapped and super-processed. People are growing up barely able to boil a carrot, let alone assemble a nutritious, locally grown, organic, wholesome meal for one, two or eight hungry people. There are shops now in Jersey selling all the unpackaged, organic, healthy raw materials. We need to make the time to stock up, check the recipes online, and prepare good food together every day.
If we spent less time glued to our screens we would find time, not just to walk home together chatting, but to get into the kitchen, sing, laugh, and bang some pans around together too. If we let the children out to play with the neighbours, we might get to know them as well. We would find that it’s fun to share our time, not just with Netflix, Google and Amazon, but with our actual real-life friends, relatives and neighbours. On the beach, in the woods, and on the dunes, there are endless adventures to have and to share.
There’s much more we can do for our health than ten-minute visits, sat with our GPs to get more pills, to then sit alone and take behind locked doors.
Is our health department working with the transport designers, the local growers, and the housing and urban environment experts, to plan for less ill health in the future rather than more? If not, why not?
A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 17 January 2019
