Triumph of naturalness

More often than not, civilisation is still at its old game. It sways you as if in a swing, first forward, giving the impression of movement and progress and next moment backwards, leaving no doubt that the so-called progress was mere illusion. It is no longer news that the denatured food in which the hands of technology is very evident has no nutritional value and advantage over the natural food stuff and fruits. Take for example the milled rice or Uncle Ben’s type of rice. Nutritionists warn us that it has no nutritional advantage over brown rice and that if anything it is chaff. Our gaze is now being turned inwards to embrace Okada Rice.

The same has been said of white flour bread and, indeed, practically all flour products. White sugar belongs to this family of foodless foods. Scientific evidence has been thrown up in Europe and the United States revealing that babies fed on their mothers’ milk are more “intellectually brighter and have better eyesight than those fed on cow milk or formula. The discovery, attributed to leading scientists, even suggests that when premature babies fed on cow’s milk or formulas are malnourished their development may suffer irreversible impairment.

The crux of the matter is said to be the amount of a long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids available to the baby in the last three months of pregnancy when it consolidates its growth, and so soon after given the fact that “60 per cent of the brain and 30 per cent of the retina,” the light sensitive part of the eye, “are made up of fatty acids. Two fatty acids in particular (Omega-3 and Omega-6) are described as most crucial. Both are abundant in maternal milk but not available at all in cow’s milk or baby foods. Against the background of 5 per cent of 625, 000 births in the UK, suffering from “breathing problems and higher rate of disorder,” attention was turned to Faroe Islands where women “eat a high fish diet” and “carry more babies to full term than any other population.”

Approximately, 20 million low weight babies are born every year globally but mostly in developing countries, Portugal 9.5 and Finland the lowest with 3.9 per cent. And panning to the slogan that “Nine months in the womb allows the brain central nervous system to reach full potential” the British Nutritional Foundation recommended that fatty acids be included in infant formular food. Professor Alan Lucas, (1910-1995), Head of Childhood Nutrition Centre, London, studied eight-year-olds and found that “children fed on mothers’ milk had clear advantages over formula-fed infants.”

Alexander Leaf, emeritus Professor of clinical Medicine at Harvard Medical School, who died in 2012, aged 92, once said: “It may be that over the past two generations, mothers have avoided feeding with their milk for convenience and cosmetic reasons. This may have resulted in two generations of children with developmental difficulties. Children who are not as intelligent as their natural ability would have permitted.” In his 80s he began to study the effects of fish oil and fatty acids on longevity, describing the effectiveness of fish oil’s Omega -3 fatty acids in curtailing heart attacks that result in chaotic contractions of the heart’s muscles.

It is noteworthy that our country still boasts of an alert population given more to instinctive or intuitive sensing than to experimentation. How often has it been said in our land even if only as a joke , that today’s children behave not as children in the days of their parents on account of not being raised on maternal milk but on the cow milk from the feeding bottle they leave with the house-helps as they hurry out of the house to work. One can sense a deep meaning in this seeming superficiality. Externally, the bodies of man and cow belong to the same material origin although they may be said to belong to different animal species in scientific categorisation. And as the external form is merely a coarse materialisation of the finer animating core, according to enlightenment by higher knowledge on earth today, the originating essence in both cases must belong to different orders, the higher, that is man, to nobler, the lower to the less noble. Cow milk must, therefore, be intended by Nature for the infant cow and maternal milk for the infant human child. Nature does not ever go wrong. To construct the function otherwise is to seek to make the cow play surrogate mother for the human foetus.