How Healthy is Our Diet?
In today's conditions, eating healthy is quite difficult, and it gets harder every day. The real problem is not being aware of this. While we think we are eating healthy, unfortunately, we are not succeeding. Environmental pollution, depletion of the ozone layer, damage to nature and soil by human destruction, the chemicals we know or don't know in packaged products, and misconceptions have also negatively affected our health. The most basic example of this is the food we eat, food and drinks we think are healthy but are not. If we go into a little more detail and talk about permanent damage, we can give the Chernobyl disaster as an example.
The Chernobyl Disaster
The Chernobyl disaster began on April 26, 1986. It began because its effects are still ongoing. It was an event large enough to destroy not just its surroundings but the whole world. If the radiation had mixed with water, there would not have been a single living thing in the entire Black Sea and Marmara Sea. They prevented it from mixing with water, but they could not prevent it from mixing with soil. Even after 34 years, they still cannot prevent the radiation that has seeped into the soil and cannot clean it up. Although soil is a self-renewing entity, it struggles to clean radiation, and according to research, they cannot provide an explanation as to when it will be completely cleaned. The biggest harm of radiation mixing with soil is that the food people eat grows there. According to research, tea was the most affected product. Experts do not consider drinking more than one glass of tea a day healthy because the radiation in the soil passes into the tea, which can cause diseases like cancer and its derivatives. Considering the Turkish people's addiction to tea, can you imagine how dangerous this is?
Packaged Products
In addition to these, we also need to examine the packaged products we eat daily. Every product has an ingredients list on the back, but unfortunately, there are coded chemicals. Because they are coded, our people are not sufficiently aware. I want to talk a little about the coded ingredients; Water, sugar (S)* or high fructose corn syrup (F)*, pineapple juice concentrate, acidity regulator (citric acid), gelling agent (pectin), flavorings, antioxidant (ascorbic acid), coloring (beta-carotene). And unfortunately, there are many more codes whose contents the public does not know. The more aware we become, the healthier we will eat. Experts explain that these ingredients are harmful to human health and recommend that we consume fewer packaged products and wash the fruits and vegetables we buy from the market with plenty of water before consuming them. A misconception is to soak fruits and vegetables in vinegar water. Since vinegar is acetic acid, it destroys the vitamins while eliminating the chemicals in vegetables. For this reason, the beginning of healthy living starts with healthy eating.
