Are we eating ourselves towards ill health?

As the focus in building Kenya’s economy shifts towards entrepreneurship, budding entrepreneurs have all their focus glued towards making their business successful.

With the zeal to get their start-ups a share of the market, many entrepreneurs are working very hard to the point of forgetting that health is what will help them meet their goals. The number one aspect in taking care of one’s self is ensuring that one gets good nutrition. Good nutrition helps in prevention of many lifestyle and degenerative diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity, gastropathy and the likes. Recently, the younger population has been associated with lifestyle diseases that were a preserve of the older generation. It is therefore important to ensure that your health and nutrition statuses are good in order to boost productivity.

So what could be the cause of the shift in the prevalence of these illnesses? The answer lies in the poor eating habits. With the issue of traffic snarl-ups, most people tend to avoid taking breakfast in order to rush and evade the traffic. This is one of the major harmful habits that anyone could commit because it has serious implications to the stomach lining and deprive you of the energy needed for the entire day at work.  Sadly, it doesn’t end there…you could end up looking even older than your true age. These findings have been backed up by the University of Erlangen, which proceeded to state that one could end up reducing their life expectance by 2.5 years compared to those who take a worthwhile breakfast. I believe you are building a dynasty and would want to see it grow from heights to heights.

The downfall of absconding breakfast is that, one is tempted to compensate for it when they get back home in the evening by having a king’s dinner. First, in the evening one doesn’t need much energy as they are going to sleep. Therefore once insulin works on the blood glucose from the digested food, it is turned into fat and coagulates on the blood vessels, the vital body organs and underneath the skin. The result of this is undesirable weight gain and in turn obesity. But then, how do you even get to sleep with such a full stomach let alone the disturbance of the human body’s biological clock? Don’t ever ask yourself again where that insomnia is coming from especially after binge eating at dinner!

What happens when you gain weight and have no time to exercise? Replace a meal with a fruit salad! You could end up cutting that weight, yes; but have you ever sat down and asked yourself what the implications of this are? For good nutrition, one must have a balanced diet. A deficiency in any nutrient; be it micro or macro will result in a disorder, a disease or impaired immunity that could predispose you to even more diseases. This then implies that you will start feeling weak, and may even look frail and sickly. Would any of your clients or partners want to work with someone looking like that? You have the answer.

Now that I have encouraged you to take a balanced diet, let it not be a revenge mission…do not eat the food too fast so that you get back to your errands. When eating fast, it is most likely that food will not be chewed well. Normally while chewing, the food mixes with the saliva that contains salivary amylase responsible for the initiation of the digestion process. If the food isn’t chewed properly, this process isn’t well initiated, thus taking the food to the stomach and intestine in chunks. This in turn overburdens the stomach as well as the intestines, something that could leave you feeling bloated. But that’s not it, most of the time you eat fast, you tend to realize that you have over eaten once you are done eating! For this reason, every time you eat fast, there is a probability that you could end up eating more than your body really needs. The outcome of this is true…obesity!

Before I conclude, let me mention this…every business meeting, office meeting, tea breaks and all manner of breaks are characterized by coffee drinking. Coffee drinking is beneficial when it is occasionally taken in low quantity. The benefits range from it being a source of chlorogenic acid, an antioxidant associated with weight loss as it aids in fat reduction. Other benefits include improvement of alertness and reduction of the probability of developing kidney stones, gallstones, Parkinson’s disease as well as liver cirrhosis for the heavy alcohol drinkers. However, many of us are having far more than the occasional tiny cup of coffee, need I mention that murky stuff that comes out of the coffee making machine. This habit could in fact generate very negative consequences to our health. These could range from heart disease due to caffeine contained in the coffee, which seeks to elevate blood cholesterol and alter the normal functioning of the heart. Even worse, for those drinking coffee all the time in order to boost their efficiency at work, the opposite is true.

All in all, the point is that our body is our number one asset, take good care of it and it will serve you well, it will give you all the assets and revenue you are chasing after!