Recently I was appalled at a situation I witnessed in a supermarket parking lot.  In a car parked lackadaisically askew in the slot beside me were a mother and her friend sitting in the front seats.  They were grossly overweight, and there were two small children unbuckled in the back seat.  That wasn’t the show.  The entertainment was the mother behind the wheel feasting on her box of French fries, gooped with sweet ketchup, making sure she was wiping the cardboard clean and greedily pushing the fries into her mouth. She did not seem to be chewing them, just stuffing and swallowing furtively as she sucked and licked her greasy fingers.  

The two children in the back seat, not unlike apples falling far from the tree, were busy following suit.  One of the children had the dregs of a hamburger in its wrapper and appeared to be smearing her face with it.  The other younger child had ice cream melting earnestly in the June heat of Grand Bahama.  I thought, “Whoa what a sight this is, the blind leading the blind, and these children would likely become just like their mother in the coming years.  And if we think of how families often act by rote, they might just be like their Grammy too.”

I thought of snapping a picture of them, all going at it, so to speak.  I had seen enough and knew I could likely find this scenario acted out in many parking lots in the world to-day.  It was just past three o’clock, Island pickup time for the school children.  I could only imagine what had taken place inside that little car right after pickup from school. It might have gone something like this.  “Mommy we’re hungry!” And mother, herself likely always being on the hungry side could have had the pangs of her sugar level waning, and the overwhelming thought of boosting it with the experience of eating something, and the sooner the better. 

These are tough economic times on our island, probably similar to much of the world these days, but if “out there”  is anything like this city the fast food drive through is always busy with willing patrons.  So she might have evaluated her gas tank, thought quickly about what she would make for dinner and when her purse came up on the right side from empty she would have pointed her car towards the fast-food outlet.  Once there in the lineup and upon being pressed by the employee behind the squawk box, with hyperkinetic noisy children calling out their wants behind her, she would have ordered quickly and probably without real thought.  Then with the cardboard on board and the children’s brains wired down hard upon their lips and tongue actions she headed out down the road to place them next to my vehicle in the food store parking lot.  Then when I arrived she was head down and hard at it, getting a brain fix from the box of sweet, salty, sour, bitter and fatty tastes which are instinctive and innate stimulations for the mouth, lips and tongue.

Many would say here, “and your point is Dr.?”  Well my friend, my point is that she and her children in turn get little in the way of healthy help from this type of anxious, knee jerk reactive behavior.  The stimulating flavors that her brain is picking up on now would never have been attached to such a matrix as chips and ketchup in the wild.  Now we are still the recipients of Mother Nature’s bounty it is true.  We were given the earth to be free upon but not in the altered state that “modern methods” are turning and twisting it into.  Allowing ourselves to be turned and twisted up too, to be stressed, by willingly becoming part of what is nutritionally unnatural and non nurturing is folly to our species instincts and innate.  My point is that this mother is teaching her children to “non-survive.” Through her ignorance she is committing the heresy of enabling parental weakening of the human gene pool to ensue.  Apparently this matters to the children to-day for we see the genetic markers straying and mutating in the unhealthy young of our species.  Our genes are the codes of our chromosomes which cause origami like folding of the amino acids, our proteins, into tissues which allow us to be what we are.  This folding exactly of the essential amino acids causes us to be uniquely human. 

I was very pleased the other day to see that Disney will no longer serve or allow to be served in any of its properties or attractions, “unhealthy fast foods.” I do hope this includes those things that are not foods, those items and their preparations that you would never find, never mind to thrive upon, in the wild.  Our species, our unique one of a kind in all of the heavens, is just what it is.  And we got here on the backs of countless of billions of others, stumbling through ongoing evolutionary tumbles and natural selections; we finally got to be the fragile apex mammal with a tenuous foothold upon this planet of great abundance.  Now we must rally to protect ourselves, to help us stay here on the apex, not only surviving for the short time but to thrive and survive for the long time too. 

Science has proven that the unique qualities that set us apart from other mammals are our large brain to body ratio.  We have the largest brain cortex, which apparently in earth time, is relatively recent in its presentation.   But what is wonderful to acknowledge is that our cortex contains huge areas of its mass, its real estate, which are dedicated to feeling and then controlling willingly in response to that feel, the anatomy of first the lips, mouth and tongue and secondly the thumbs and fingers of the hands.  And it is that brain with its desire to have you first hold on to food, then bring it to your lips and mouth that rules us; like when it overrides our sensibilities in our weakened moments.  It is that large brain driven to memory that our mom with the kids was overwhelmed by; she remembered the rewards from tastes that the brain uses to judge our success at finding forage with, from its ancient time. 

Our brain craves the tastes of sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umomi, the savory taste of roasted fats and proteins; the savory taste like glutamates, like her fries and ketchup.  And she was helpless against that innate pull to feel and then feed that taste to her mouth, tongue and lips, to satisfy her brain cry, as were the children.

What to respect is that along with our large dedicated brain to the body parts of the mouth, hands and feet came a corresponding consciousness.  We enabled exquisite brain sensitivities through touch and with the cerebellum on board too our feeling abilities for shape and texture evolved; and we can only feel them with the mouth, lips and tongue, the fingers or the toes.  We choose what we put into our body first through touch and then through taste and if the items we are assessing pass muster we eat them, usually without hesitation. 

Historically that seems to be how we got here, to be what we are.  We got to be good at food identification and then preparation.  Then we mastered fire which enabled pre-digestion of some of our foods; thereby giving us access to a new source of abundance of calories and we thrived.   Now however things upon the surface of this world of cunning modern people have changed. Food-like-items are being enhanced for our consumption.  Some are treated with materials like pink slime and even human recycled fecal proteins are being considered.  For many of us all anything held has to do is have the feeling like food, first to the fingers, then to the tongue when mouthed.  And finally if it tastes like it is food too, we swallow.  And the ignorant, selfish, unscrupulous profit driven manufacturers will target us to eat it. And we will. 

Think about some of the matrixes of food-like-materials that are extruded for our consumption; like flavored crackers, candies, sausages and bologna, to name so few of them.  None of them would be found in the wild yet we readily give them to our children and guests at dinner.  How thoughtless is that?  We think we are so smart and yet we allow it to be OK to eat hamburgers and hot dogs, the base of putridity and rancidity, the lowest yielding food-like materials on the planet. Where would you get those in the wild? We eat them because they taste like they should be food. I discount the intellect of the hostess and host when they have friends for a BBQ and the best they can come up with for their guests’ meal is the absolute bottom of the food chain, hot dogs and hamburgers.  It doesn’t matter how good they taste and how you may gussy them up with condiments and healthy additions.  The fact is, and science supports this, is that they are useless as a source of nutrition.  We cannot survive never mind thrive on ground meat.  So why do we behave in such a negative manner?  Because we did it when we were young and it tasted good then; and now we do it out of habit for it still is tasty, we don’t think of the consequences.  And we do it because hamburger, hot dogs, extruded meats like sausages or bologna are everywhere in the food markets and often cheaper than nutritionally better yielding more stable food.  We mostly shop with the singular benchmark of food needs being how things will taste.  Then the marker changes by the influence of price.  Then we further modify choices in nutritional delivery to convenience, accessibility, with marketing and advertisement playing a role here.  Rarely is the first criterion of food shopping quality of nutritional yield. Even though we are shopping to feed our most precious resources, our children and loved ones; even though their survival and long term health is determined then and there by our choices.  We readily let our tongue and mouth be our guides in this “oh too vicious for easy thriving” Garden of Eden.

I drove away from them, those parking lot scavengers lost among the living.  And I thought eagerly of my own good fortunes.  I thought about how if I hadn’t been educated and then licensed to be a health care provider I might have been doomed to conduct myself in similar behavior as the parking lot people. They were allowing themselves to be driven to grubbing for costly but easily had tasty morsels.  Instead I glanced over to my sacks of food purchases on the seat beside me and reviewed with confidence their content. I was going home to be fed apex nutrition.  And those food choices with skillful preparation would taste great too while helping ensure that my health would stand high on the human apex of wellness potential.  And finally a bit of a head shake for in the end my choices and methods would probably cost about the same as the parking lot feast would have. 

So living life to the fullest begins with using our huge brain to get awareness of what we are and how we got here; then use it to witness what we are doing and how what we are doing is effecting us.  Finally we can harness that knowledge and clutch on hard to the methods that allow us to always deny lackadaisical behavior around our diets and lifestyles.  When it comes to health there is usually a better way and it is often easier too.  Your job is to relentlessly take charge and find that better and easier way; or will others soon glimpse you feeding yourself in parking lot frenzy?

About the author: Dr. Brian Blower has been a licensed chiropractor for over 35 years practicing Applied Kinesiology and has been in private practice on Grand Bahama Island for the past 10 years. He is a founding member of Applied Kinesiology Canada and was educated at the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College. He is a founding member of the Bahamas Association of Chiropractic. He has treated many celebrities and also specializes in sports medicine.  He can be reached at 242-374-5424.  You can also find Dr. Blower on Facebook HERE