Clinical Nature

Situated in the gentle jungle and rice fields of Bali, Indonesia is a school radically changing the way we teach children from all corners of the globe.

“Green School in Bali, Indonesia is giving its students a relevant, holistic and green education in one of the most amazing environments on the planet.”
www.greenschool.org

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Shaped by glacial temperatures, stark landscapes and protracted winters, the traditional Inuit diet had little in the way of plant food, no agricultural or dairy products, and was unusually low in carbohydrates. Most people subsisted on what they hunted and fished.

Patricia Cochran, an Inupiat from Northwestern Alaska describes her food culture:

Our meat was seal and walrus, marine mammals that live in cold water and have lots of fat. We used seal oil for our cooking and as a dipping sauce for food. We had moose, caribou, and reindeer. We hunted ducks, geese, and little land birds like quail called ptarmigan. We caught crab and lots of fish – salmon, whitefish, tomcod, pike, and char. Our fish were cooked, dried, smoked, or frozen. We ate frozen raw whitefish, sliced thin. The elders liked stinkfish, fish buried in seal bags or cans in the tundra and left to ferment. And fermented seal flipper, they liked that too.

These foods hardly make up the “balanced” diet most of us grew up with, and they look nothing like the mix of grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy we’re accustomed to seeing in conventional food pyramid diagrams. Yet how can people who gorge on fat and animal protein be healthier than we are? (more…)

“Worldwide, more than 1.3 billion people are overweight, whereas only 800 million are underweight – and these statistics are diverging rapidly.” – Barry M Popkin

For most developing nations, obesity has emerged as a more serious health threat than hunger. Although under-nutrition and famine remain significant problems in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, even desperately poor countries such as Nigeria and Uganda are wrestling with the dilemma of obesity.

Globalisation over the past 20 years has contributed to the increased consumption of sweetened beverages, vegetable oils and animal-source foods by poor people in developing countries, as they also adopt sedentary Western lifestyles. This combination of lifestyle and dietary changes is paving way for a global public health catastrophe.
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Okinawans, the world’s longest-lived people, believe that the food they eat is “nuchi gusui” which roughly translates as “medicine for life.” – Dr Andrew Weil

Healthy eating is vital to give us the physical energy and mental clarity we need to enjoy life and perform at our best. Yet our diet is neglected at times when we are overworked, stressed or fatigued, when our mind and body is most in need of a dose of essential nutrients.

It can be difficult to change bad eating habits and even harder to know who to trust for diet advice that works. Fortunately, we can still learn from the traditions of generations past who understood that our food is so much more than simply what we do or do not eat. A healthy diet complements a healthy life, both of which we should all learn not to take for granted.

Every traditional culture in history has respected the necessity of food not only for survival but also for good health. Now more than ever, we need to eat responsibly for our own health and restore the traditional food wisdoms of our ancestors.

Here are five simple and flexible principles to inspire a more sustainable food culture that is healthy for our body and the environment.

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Almost a decade ago, the European Environment Agency (EEA) published its report titled, Late lessons from early warnings: the precautionary principle 1896-2000. The report is based on selected case studies from the last century detailing how inaction to early warnings resulted in late lessons learned some decades later.
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