I was reading an article recently in a health magazine and the writer suggested that if we ate and drank healthily for 80 per cent of the time, then we could allow ourselves to break out and indulge in the less healthy stuff for the other 20 per cent. Not a bad regime to follow I suppose.
It's easy to get complacent about diet and food, for most of us have so much available to us, and a huge amout of choice. Sadly, mountains of foodstuffs get thrown away on a regular basis. And lots of us eat to excess.
As I lay in bed early one morning listening to the radio, I listened with sadness as a correspondent from East Africa reported on the drought in Somalia, and told the terrible story of a mother trekking hundreds of miles to find her child some food, only for the child to die on arrival at a camp. I found it hard to believe that this could still happen in the world. Today. Under the same sky.
We have technology. We can send people to the moon. We can create the most advanced medical equipment in the western world. Why can't our knowledge be put to use in other lands when the needs are so very great?
A wiser person than I may know the reasons why these catastrophic events occur with depressing regularity and why conditions never really improve for long. I am looking from afar and cannot begin to comprehend the reasons why innocent human beings should suffer as they do. But I can hope and pray that somehow a breakthrough can be made.
How lucky are we, who can actually have the choice of a 80/20 diet?
