Almost none of us follow proper diet nor exercise well enough on a daily basis. And also none of us have genes from parents that are free from hereditary diseases. And we live in a society that is briddled with various kinds of pollution. To top it up, most food we eat is taken out of, and maintained through, toxic chemicals. With all these, it seems like maintaining good health is impossible. Yet I am not convinced completely.
Our forefathers from a couple of generations before, especially living in smaller towns or in villages leading a traditional life, be it by farming or other professions, were also not healthy in my view. It is a misconception that they were free from disease and lived happily. There were many childbirth deaths of both baby or mother leading to an 'average' low life expectancy then. But I think there is more to it.
The main cause for the belief of no disease is lack of regular lab test or any kind of attempt to diagnose disease before they became evident through visible symptoms. Neither the infrastructure was good nor there was a tendency to do full check-ups at the first instance of symptoms. People carried disease silently and collapsed one day or succumbed to disease after a brief spell. Lack of proper medicines and full-fledged labs like today combined with under-qualified allopathic doctors submerged the real state. Many had sight problems, hearing or paralysis issues, and they prolonged long as well. It is a myth that most people from older generations did not have diseases.
Yes, they may have been healthier than average citizens today by some margin. But even today there are people who follow a strict diet and exercise regularly. Some of these also mostly consume organic food and live in less polluted environs. Yet we do see some catching disease or have a premature death. None of the hypothesis fit well of the facts on ground. I think many of us miss the effect of emotions on the body. Stress plays a big role in health and that has been proven already. But I guess that’s not all. What happens in universe always comes back as a reaction in not necessarily some visible sign or form we recognize.
Every strong ambition and negative thought, whether supplemented by such actions or not, will also always have an impact on health. I do not rule out a possibility, but not fully convinced yet, that emotions happen or originate from heart. We have got only one known thinking organ. And that is the brain. It is the one organ that manages and understands the entire body.
Yes, there is some progress in the school of thought that each cell has a thinking capacity of its own. But that even if true (and I believe so) is limited for its own survival. It is the unstoppable thinking brain that can have the greatest impact on health. The world is not devoid of examples of people who eat non-vegetarian (and of gruesome ones too), smokers or alcoholics and yet have no disease clinically and live long. Many such examples incidentally often correlate to happy people. A happy soul is the one that lives healthy, long, and die peacefully! And I beleive that's a bigger construct than anything else.
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