The modern man today, is fixated about clothes, wristwatches, shoes, perfumes, homes, bank account, power, authority and influence. His health takes second place. He is not too interested in how living well naturally can boost it, enhance his physical fitness and his longevity. It is not surprising, therefore, he now dies like a chicken. Yes, because he ignores Democritus’ Doctrine, he virtually lives inside the graveyard, today.

Buffon, a French scientist, explains that man is programmed to live for 140 years. He theorizes that all animals live 7 times their biological age of maturity. So, since man matures at 20, his thesis is that man’s normal life expectancy is 140. Going through the record book, there is abundant evidence that persons have indeed lived up to this age and even beyond. Two examples. One Englishman Thomas Pan lived for 156 years. How about Li Chung Yun, the great Chinese herbalist? He died at 256 years. Even then Methuselah lived for 969 years.
Bu these days, you find people dying even at 36 years of age, thanks to organic malfunctions. Why are people dying so young? This is the issue WEEKEND OBSERVER explores in this magazine.

Bad food habits.
It is a common saying that your race to death or a life of good health begins in the kitchen. Too true, what you eat largely determines whether you will die early or live long. The Guardian of March 1, 2008 reported that one man Manuel Uribe ignored this fact. And, so, he ate and drank everything that came his way.

Before he knew it, he was weighing 560 kg and bedridden when he was 42. At this weight, he was not just the world’s fattest man, he was on his way to the graveyard! Knowing this, he quickly sought out a natural healthy eating formula in two years, his weight crashed to 280kg. today, his weight is still reducing. Now, he is an evangelist of eating and living well. During an interview with a journalist, he said: “It is incredible that man can go to the moon and fix a computer but unfortunately he doesn’t know how to eat.”

Indeed, the modern man doesn’t really eat or drink well. For instance, he hardly balance the food types he eats. His preference is for sweet, sweet foods – not mixing them with sour, bitter and bland ones. Hence, he hardly maintains a blood of 7.32 required for a healthy life.
What is more, he shops for de-natured foods in eateries and mama put joints when he is not eating fast foods laden with toxic white sugar/flour, saturated fats etc. on each occasion, he further overfeeds himself with these foods, thus overstrains his stomach, liver and kidneys. Without health stomach, liver or kidney death is near.

Poor water intake routine.
Don’t be surprised to find modern man washing down his food with an “orobo” bottle of soft drink. Not quality water. He required about 8 glasses of water daily as an adult. The standard rule state even that it is not physiological wise to drink liquids while eating. You drink them at least 30 minutes before and two hours after meals. But trust the modern man. He is not bothered by this rule. In most cases, he doesn’t drink sufficient water to drive his metabolism. Invariably, he lives a dehydarted life until one day at midday his sun sets. His body “engine” knocks because of chronic complications of water deficiency syndrome.

Unhealthy salt habits.

Lack of sodium –that is, sodium chloride or common salt-can lead to the inability of the body to retain as well as absorb water.

This is why a person with this problem end up urinating excessively. But then it is hard for one to suffer low or high sodium intake as long as one eats balance natural foods. However, because the modern man over consumes a lot of synthetic foods, he gets death jitters from an overload of sodium in what he eats or drinks. To worsen matters, he still adds sodium to his meals through the salt he had handy at table.

Unknown to him, too much salt kills. You only need about 200 mg of salt in a day. Nothing more. That is what Dr. David Reuben says in his book EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT NUTRITION. It is potassium you need to add to your food dietically, not sodium.
Raw foods.

If you want to live long, then you must cultivate the habit of eating at least 5 servings of ripe organic fruits/vegetables daily. It is through this eating formula, you have access to the vitamins, minerals, trace elements, hormones antioxidants enzymes and other dietary nutrients you need to keep illness and death away. Susannah and Leslie Kenton in THE NEW RAW ENERGY reveal: “A high raw diet in which 50-70% of your foods are eaten raw help you lose weight, prevent colds and flu as well as retard aging.”

But does the average modern man care about this advice? No. He will tell you he is not an animal who relishes fruits/vegetables and edible weed/grass!! Alternatively, he may use them scantily to supplement his menu over-rich in carbohydrates, starches animal proteins and saturated fats. Even among few modern men who know the nutritional value of fruits /vegetables there is still cause for worry, they derive little nutrition from them because the fruits /vegetables they consume are grown with inorganic fertilizers, are harvested before their natural maturity, or have undergone nutritional degeneration because of poor storage and transportation problems. And, so, they are eating trash that shorten their lives.

Lack of a detoxification regime.
Each day, toxins enter the body through the air we breathe in and the food we eat. Also, toxins are produced naturally from the metabolic processes within the body. Fortunately, these toxins are removed from the body with the aid of the skin, lungs, kidney, liver and colon.
Sometimes, the body’s eliminative process though is so short changed that there is an accumulation of toxins in the system. Delay in removing them is one of the triggers for the onset of chronic degenerative diseases that end up in death.

Of course natural fasting is the safest way of shedding this load of dangerous toxins from the body. But how many modern men understand what natural fasting is all about. Most of them only do spiritual fasting forgetting that it can lead to an incomplete precarious, detoxification process in the body. It is very unsafe for instance to allow cleaned-out toxin to still remain in the body without using the appropriate raw foods/herbs and water intake to flush them out as quickly as possible. Sadly enough, a lot of modern men have even already wakened their livers and kidneys with self-medicated drugs and/or alcohol. Given this, these two organs may be lacking the capacity to aid an efficient detoxification process of their bodies.

At times, one discovers that because of a life of working in air-conditioned offices and sitting for long hours in immobilised postures in our work stations, the skin as well as the static large intestines often lose their abilities to handle detoxification of the body, also. Hence, you may come across people who often complain of mysterious high or low grade fever basically because they do not sweat and perspire as normal beings do. Others cry out that they do not visit the toilet for three days even though they eat thrice daily. Rather than seek professional help for their problems, they either ignore them; or take to ignorant self-medication. Before long, there are health complications. Death calls, having been waiting at the door.

Insufficient rest, relaxation and sleep.
One trait of the modern man is that he is a workaholic. He no longer defines work. Now, it is the other way round. Work is his lord and master. This has resulted in what has come to be known as the dictatorship of work and time. Given these challenges and the need to survive in his new driving unfriendly, capitalist environment the modern man hardly rests, relaxes and has enough sleep.

Exodus 20:8 counsels man to “rest one day every week”. But the modern man has no room for such an advice. For him, is work...work…and ...work. No rest. No relaxation. Even when he decides to take some rest and relaxation, you often discover he is liberally still at “work”, overburdening his body. For instance, you may find him drinking and/or binge eating pepper soup a hang out where he has gone to relax!! In addition to all these stressful past times, a free woman may be at his side waiting for a trip with him to Disneyland. Certainly these habits dig one’s early grave. Nothing more.

If modern man doesn’t rest and relax, you can be sure he also doesn’t have sufficient sleep – a life elixir for renewing tired, broken body at night. Explaining this malaise of the modern man, Dr. Chris Drake says: “Before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in 1880, people sleep an average of 10 hours at night. Since then, people now sleep 6 hours or less. Hence, there is a problem of inadequate sleep and its attendant disorders today which include weight gain, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, depression, substance abuse and heart problem.”

Curiously, modern man is not piqued by the fact that he is aging fast and dying slowly from ill health arising from poor sleep. Instead, he goes about boasting that he is good at sleeping less and staying awake at his desk. He is always further ready to flaunt his spurious good health – anyway buoyed up with drugs, coffee and energy drinks – before people like Dr. Chris Drake, a senior scientist at Henry Ford Hospital Sleep Disorder And Research Centre, Detroit.

But you cannot cheat nature. Sooner than later nature exacts its pound of flesh from the sleep loser whose vital resources for living long may already be worn down by the ravaging stress, anxiety nerosis, worries and phobias of modern life. So before he is even forty years old the modern man dies. Yet life is supposed to begin at 40.

Other miscellaneous paths to his early death.
All said, there are several other ways modern man shortens his life. To start with, he hardly exercises these days. He has become a parked car which engine is not warmed once a day. Secondly, his personal hygiene and environmental sanitation habits are poor. This explains why he suffers often from deadly food and water-borne diseases. His dirty lifestyle have contributed to the scourge of malaria in Nigeria, Africa and the Third World. In Nigeria, a child dies every 30 seconds from malaria. True, true so dirty no day kill black man-o?

Thirdly, unlike his ancestors, modern man is proverbially very wicked. Negative thoughts rules his mind. Studies reveal that an average of 60,000 thoughts runs through a man’s mind each day. About 80% of them are said to be negative ones. So they boomerang on the modern man giving him stress, worries, anxiety neurosis and phobias. In the end he dies from these psychological disorders.

Fourthly, modern man doesn’t bother about carrying out medical check ups on himself. Hence, he sometimes dies suddenly from hidden diseases with or without symptoms. Also, modern man cherishes illusory, simplistic medical formula like the one that falsely promises that cocoa is a magic remedy for all ailments.

Conclusion.
Poor modern man. Today, he literally lives inside the graveyard. His life is short because it is on the fast lane. For him, good health is a transcendental commodity. He can touch it but cannot possess it. One SAO PAULO slum dweller explains: “For us good health is like an item on a wooden display in a luxurious shopping mall. We can look at it but it is beyond our reach.”