Web of Life

If Sri Lanka is to seriously and sincerely move towards an alternative middle path economic policy, one of the healthiest moves would be a turn-around to health education and promotive health, from the current focus and heavy expenditure on curative health or treating of symptoms. A proper awareness and promotive health would need to focus on vital areas such as food, proper nutrition and a balanced diet based on our traditional lifestyle, environment and our natural resources.

One of Sri Lanka's leading nutritionists recently told the People's Movement for the Rights of Patients that it needed to bring about widespread public awareness of the deceitful and disgraceful methods being used by some Western interests to poison or pollute the minds of people on matters related to food. The horror or tragedy comes out in a stomach punch in the comments of a poor mother, who like millions of others, has been conditioned to think in terms of the vested interests of the food giants. The mother remarked that if she got a little extra cash she would bring some sausages for her little children so that they would, hopefully, rise to the stature of a great cricketer. She probably was not aware that by taking her children away from the simple but nourishing diet of green leaves, salads and sambols she was leading them to habits and tastes that pose dangers, ranging from food poisoning to obesity.

With more than 80 billion rupees being busted up on an import spree or mania this year, Sri Lanka is heavily overloaded with junk foods, which are not tolerated in most Western countries. Since food laws in Sri Lanka often do not go beyond the wrapper and with even the law regarding expiry dates being regularly killed, millions of people are being fooled or slowly poisoned. That is why health education could play a lifesaving role today.

Besides the overload of junk foods, millions of Sri Lankans are also freely exposed to all sorts of excesses, exaggerations, lies, damn lies and statistics -- often at their own expense. One of a thousand or ten thousand instances is a campaign to promote a particular brand of milk powder as being necessary, if not essential, to prevent a particular disease. Most nutritionists and doctors say that any ordinary milk, or in some cases a tablet costing a few cents, could provide the vitamin required to prevent that disease.

Before the market economy and the exploitative tentacles of corporate globalisation were forced upon Sri Lanka wholesale, millions of our people lived happily and healthily on mother's milk or fresh milk. In a subtle and sophisticated manner, minds were reconditioned to move away from breast milk to bottle feeding and from fresh milk to powdered milk products. The free-for-all, anything-goes market policy gets so nutty that we even see a groom accepting a bride because she prefers packeted coconut milk powder to the fresh milk, though a coconut estate is given as part of her dowry. Whether that groom would have deserved the broom is another matter.

With medical ethics now dying or degenerating into a business or a trade and the drug industry controlling or manipulating the health sector, the government needs to intervene urgently, through extensive programmes, for health education and promotive health.

Civic action and patients' rights groups like the Peoples Movement for the Rights of Patients could also play a vital role in building healthy bodies, which bear healthy minds, and healthy minds which could build healthy bodies.