"RECOVER THE TEMPLE THAT IS YOUR BODY: EAT TO LIVE!"
by Khalil Somadi

I love both bacon and salt!!!
Bacon and salt however do not give a DAMN about me! Neither does ham, or any other pork!
I have hypertension and both pork and salt raises my blood pressure and cholesterol levels and clogs the arteries to my heart.

Pork and salt
are
not
my
friends!

If you are African American, they are not your friends either!
Why do you think we African-Americans are so prone to have hypertension and heart disease?
I noticed this statistic even before I became ardent about eating to live.
As a black man I was raised on the typical African-American diet, because even though my father was Caribbean, my mother was African American and pork chops, ham, Bar-B-Q Ribs, Fried Chicken, Hot Wings smothered in hot sauce, Collard Greens with fat back (more pork), Mashed Potatoes with home made gravy (pork grease or the grease from the cooked meat of that day, onions, white flour, black pepper, iodized salt and water), with overcooked vegetables and of course KOOL-AID to wash it all down, which was practically filled with a pound of sugar!
Raw fruits and vegetables were eaten too, but were not the norm offered to us on a daily basis.

If you were to calculate the sodium, fat, pork and chemicals we as blacks eat on a daily basis, you too would realize why we are so prone to have high blood pressure and congenital heart disease. I know for a fact that if our people would eliminate pork completely out of their diet and replace all drinks we consume with distilled water or fruit and vegetable drinks, we would lower our blood pressure  and heart disease dramatically.

I'm not going to sit here and suggest that changing our eating habits is easy. Anything worthwhile is usually not easy!
But I WILL tell you that the things I have put into my body in the past, from cigarettes to salt and pork, have landed me in a very unfortunate health position that could have been prevented.

Kindred, let me tell you something:
You don't miss good health until you don't have it anymore!

One thing I have learned during my "recovery" transition is that once I learned better, I was compelled to do better. That means not lamenting over what I was "denying myself" and focusing on the old way...letting my impulses rule my reason.
Our minds are amazingly strong; we must reinforce what we learn with our health-conscious intent, i.e. experiment with tastes in areas that replace those unhealthy habits we've committed to let go of.
We must allow ourselves to become excited about the New Us, about new healthy food discoveries just waiting to delight our taste buds, and about having a healthy heart and clean articles and stepping out of that racial stereotype created by bad eating habits passed down and endlessly repeated.

Eat to Live, Kindreds!
Eat. To live!