My provincial travel – I see sick people all the time
It has been a very long time since I went on a vacation. I used to be sick and spent all my time studying about health just to live. Now that I felt good and healthy enough it was time to travel. Got one of those Cebu Pacific promo tickets and visited a couple of relatives in the provinces.
One thing I found out is that health is a good topic to talk about. If I talked about the web design business, there would be no connection. So health, food and wet markets were my thing. I just love visiting other people’s wet markets. Regarding health, I found out, unsurprisingly that provincial town folk are just as sick as city folk. The unifying culprit is probably television and the medical profession.
The people I met and talked at length were sick of unexplained jaw pain, vertigo, stroke recovery, debilitating asthma, polycystic ovaries, infertility, obesity, kidney pain, heart disease, cancer, psoriasis, gall bladder stones and probably many more.
What’s funny is they all believed in the standard myths of the medical quacks. They worshipped the cholesterol scare myth and eat margarine, reduced fat soya based mayonnaise, peanuts, cholesterol free vegetable based cooking oil from corn / canola / etc, they remove chicken skin and remove pork fat. Plus their staple food are all rice and its derivatives and wheat and its derivatives like white bread, pan de sal, wheat bread, instant oatmeal. They believe in pasteurized milk and have pasteurized “fresh” milk for their children, chocolate milk and powdered “milk” drink for adults. Their animal food choices are 45 day chickens, factory eggs, gmo feeds fed pigs, farmed fish tilapia, bangus, hito, plus canned and processed meats. They did buy sea food from time to time, but all of them are cooked to the core. All meat were cooked to the core as they truly believed in cooking and thought that any hint of raw meat was bad for them.
One relative had a water filter with stones, but it wasn’t working as its TDS measurement showed the same as their faucet. They all used shampoos, except for my uncle, and soaped everyday and brushed their teeth with fluoride toothpaste yet they all have tooth decay.
On safety, one town I visited had a culture of not wearing helmets when riding motorcycles. Yes really.
I think television and the medical profession has dumbed down people completely. I think this explains the majority of illnesses I found there. People are taught the wrong ideas about health so they suffer. I used to be just like them… sick too.
I sticked out like a soar thumb as I ate my animal foods raw, but they didn’t mind the times I dipped the raw sea food in vinegar — when you dip a sea creature in vinegar, it is culturally acceptable to eat it raw. But I blended well when I ate fruits in season with the townsfolk, yummy indian mangoes in season, the not so ripe kind. They didn’t really mind that I ate my food raw because they could see my before and after pics when I used to be sick and how I looked now. It’s interesting for them because the way I eat and the tricks I tell stories about helping people seem to be working on healthy looking me.