Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: May 27, 2015 12:50PM
Despite the content of the various messages ("coffee is bad"..."[male] masturbation is bad" BUT "[female] 'masturbation,' IF performed by a doctor, is GOOD..."wine is not good"...)...
...that era---referred to in this thread as the era of the "health crazes" (late 1800s through 1920s for sure...possibly up to at least WWII times in the USA)---was IMMENSELY important for the information we possess today which allows us to avoid different kinds of cancers...keep our teeth until we die...look at least a couple to a few decades "younger" than was thought "normal" decades ago (1920s/1930s for sure---look at films from that era and see thirty-year-old men/women looking like fifties or sixties now).
That era, and those pioneers, REGARDLESS of the fact that they were frequently wrong in their specifics, were the beginning of realizing that there IS a connection between what we eat/do not eat...or are exposed to (second-hand smoke...chemicals and pesticides like DDT---which eventually killed my Grandpa...too much sun, starting in infancy...talcum powder).
Before those pioneers, people assumed that EVERYONE started looking like they were elderly during their early thirties...that cancer was either bad luck, or God punishing you for something you had or had not done...and that strokes, heart disease, diabetes, many kinds of birth anomalies, etc., etc., etc. were simply a regrettable bad hand that had been randomly dealt to the affected people.
It was those "health crazes" who made the CONNECTION between what you do, or do not, take in or are exposed to and the diseases and disorders which were considered normal during those earlier times BUT ARE "NORMAL" NO MORE!!!
Yeah...they got specifics wrong back then, but very quickly (as human progress goes) they keep getting things "righter" and "righter."
There used to be a common American folk saying that a woman lost a tooth for every child she bore---and (more often than not) that USED to be true! It is true no longer, because of prenatal nutrition and supplements.
We know enough now to realize that certain nutrients, in a great many specific people, can put off things like heart disease and diabetes in specific people EVEN [often] WHEN THOSE PEOPLE HAVE AN INHERITED TENDENCY TOWARDS THEM. In many cases, we can even control things like diagnosed diabetes and heart disease with diet and lifestyle changes...and, at least sometimes, even medically reverse them.
The early geographical pioneers made plenty of mistakes (Columbus never did reach the Indian subcontinent by sailing west), but without those "mistakes," we would not be in the better positions we are in today.
Same thing for the nutrition/lifestyle pioneers.
It doesn't matter HOW many mistakes they made, because what they DID (as it turns out) was make some vital connections of thought that led to the knowledge we have, and are in the process of developing, right now.
Give the health pioneers their due, because without them, everyone reading these words would be in vastly worse shape medically, and would (if you are over the age of twenty-five or so) be looking probably DECADES "worse" than is actually true.
(And again, if you don't believe me, go look at some films from the silent era, or the 1930s-1940s...and then look up those particular actors and see when they were born, and calculate how old they were when they acted in that film. Do this a few times, and you will totally understand what I am writing here.)
Give the health pioneers their due.
They deserve it more than you probably will ever appreciate.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/27/2015 02:50PM by tevai.