Good health: The best insurance

CEBU, Philippines - The entire future of the world depends on health. It has been generally observed that only about ten percent of the Filipinos are health conscious. Fortunately, the health awareness among the population has been increasing on a steady - though small - rate in recent years.

Many countries of the world are putting great emphasis on health as reflected in their national budgets. The Philippines, at least, is trying to keep pace.  

The Human Body - the Best Machine Ever

The doctor is licensed to practice medicine. He has the right to prescribe what, to him, are the appropriate medicines for his patients. He feels he knows what is right and what is wrong for the sick people who come to him. When Henry Ford chanced to pass by a man who was tinkering with his car, he prescribed the kind of fuel for it. The man looked at him, seemingly in doubt. "I know this car," quipped the old gentleman, "and the kind of fuel it needs. I made it."

Drugs, doctors, and disease may change with the times, but the laws of health do not. Our body hasn't changed. Civilization have come and gone as the centuries rolled by, but the body of man - Japanese Negro, American, or Filipino - remains basically the same. The laws of health for the ancient people are the same laws of health for the people in the space age.

"Your health is your wealth" is truer now than ever before. There is this difference between the two temporal blessings - money and health. Caleb C. Colton said more than a hundred years ago, "Money is most envied but the least enjoyed; health is the most enjoyed but the least envied; and this superiority of the latter is still more obvious when we reflect that the poorest man would not part with health for money, but the richest man would gladly part with all his money for health."

The health habits you live day by day are the best hospital insurance policy you could take out. Health is not only a gift. It is a habit. The modern man is busy. He has to be, or the other fellow will pass him by. So, many are tense, tight, and high strung day in and day out with little or no thought of their health, the very thing that enables them to get wealth.

No time to get sick? You'll have to take time anyway, if you go on and on until you are ready to drop. Then you will have to spend all your time in the hospital, plus much of your money which you have earned at the expense of your health.

A person may be overweight from eating too much yet be hungry. If we do not eat the kind of food that makes good blood our system is hungry. The best food is not exactly the most expensive food. Children may be having the abundance of anything they want, but what they want may not be what they need for good health.

Malnutrition is common is Asia. Seventy percent of the children below school age are malnourished or under-nourished. The infant and child mortality rate in the Philippines today is 44.8 percent, more or less, of the total death rate. This high rate is attributed to malnutrition. More than half of the country's 10,000,000 babies and preschool children are suffering from malnutrition.

"For the children of pre-school age, particularly, malnutrition can be devastating to their minds. Studies of children in the United States have shown that retarded mental growth and poor performance could be attributed to nutritional deficiency during pre-school age," said former President Ferdinand E. Marcos in his speech delivered at the First National Assembly of Pre-school Education.

It is the quality of a food a person eats that gives quality to his blood that in turn distributes food to all his system. Dr. Juan Salcedo, immediate past Director of the National Science Development Board, said, "Before, the problem in Filipino food was that of quality. Now it is both quality and quantity." (FREEMAN)