With our diet we have an effective tool at hand to keep us healthy.
No matter how different our lives may be, there is one thing we all do every day: eat and drink. Each of us eats and drinks more than one and a half tons on average throughout the year. A considerable amount, whose influence on our well-being we are often not even aware of, says Maria Fanninger, co-founder of the association Land creates life: “Our food is simply incredibly important for how we are doing and how we can keep ourselves healthy. And we completely underestimate that.”
Big health risk
The saying “You are what you eat” does not come from anywhere – and shows how great the influence of food is on our body, says Maria Fanninger: “Our body cells renew themselves several times in the course of our lives. The basis for this new cell material is formed by the nutrients that we ingest through our food. We are, in the truest sense of the word, what we eat. And that’s why it doesn’t matter what we put in our bodies.”
Just as a balanced diet can keep us healthy, an unbalanced diet, which may also consist predominantly of highly processed foods, increases the risk of various diseases, above all so-called non-communicable diseases. These include diseases of the cardiovascular system, diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases and cancer. They represent our greatest health risk: almost three quarters of all deaths worldwide are due to non-communicable diseases. In Europe it is even 90 percent.
Maria Fanninger explains this significantly high percentage, among other things, with the lifestyle and nutritional style of our Western world: “We eat too much of the wrong thing and too little of the right thing, so we tend to be overweight and undernourished at the same time because we don’t supply our body with the nutrients that he needs. This increases the risk of non-communicable diseases. It is not for nothing that many of these are also called ‘diseases of civilization’: in many cases they are also the result of a certain lifestyle.”
Food can serve the body
That also has a decisive advantage, says Maria Fanninger. Because in contrast to other factors such as our physical conditions or environmental influences, which can also promote non-communicable diseases, we can choose our food consciously. “We alone decide whether our food keeps us healthy or makes us ill. That’s why we should also consciously think regarding what’s on our plate.”
