I can’t believe we need an article like this

Is açai all it’s cracked up to be?

The question this article asks is if the health benefits of the açai berry are as great as people claim. Well, that depends to whom they are listening. Leave it up to pharmo lunkheads to view natural health and medicine through the same lens they do their own dangerous practices. The last sentence of the article says “If you still smoke, drink, don’t exercise and eat fast food, drinking a few ounces of açai juice every day isn’t going to keep you healthy.”

No. Shit.

Açai, white tea, turmeric, and red wine are not medicine. They are not intended to solve specific problems. They are nutrients that fuel your body’s own natural medicines. Pfizer would love nothing more than to tell people a superfood did not specifically cure someone’s cancer, and that they should instead use their body-ravaging chemotherapy instead. And that is the refrain I hear from every pea-brained doofus who is a skeptic of natural health. “Where are the studies showing this cures X disease?”

Firstly, there won’t be any studies. Pharmos won’t pay for studies that discredit their own products. Secondly, even if there were, there are a ton of other factors at work. Not the least of which is the lifestyle as a whole of the patient in question. Just as the article said, those who eat trans-fats, sit on their fat ass watching reality TV, and drink and smoke are going to feel minimal benefits from superantioxidants and flavonoids. If the body is so beleaguered just trying to purge toxins from its inner recesses, it will practically ignore anything good that comes through. Think of it as a poor farmer out in Afghanistan. You could give him a computer and even a rudimentary internet connection, but since he’s not even literate in Dari, what good will it do him? Give that same computer to a working-class American and they might use it to get an online degree and a better paying job within a year.

By that same principle, if your body is on the defensive, giving it offensive weapons won’t help. And generally speaking allopathy is the type of defensive support a body in trouble may need, basic healthy living is what’s needed to kick it from neutral to offensive, and natural health goods are what fuel the all-out assault on disease.

And therein lies the problem with the “health”-care industry. Their definition of health and ours are not very well in line. They would like people to believe health means no immediate symptoms that cause debilitating pain. As long as you can get out of bed, go to your job and work there for 8 hours with the help of much coffee, then slog out the remaining hours drinking, watching tv, or having lazy, unfulfilling sex, you’re “healthy”.

Health is a feeling of power and energy. When you are healthy, your body feels as though it can do things you never thought possible. You may feel lighter and yet more solid. More present in your own body rather than cloistered in your brain relaying orders to an alien set of limbs. The second you get a taste for that health, you’ll also get a disdain for the poisonous notions the industry feeds you. The fact that açai isn’t making you run marathons is like the fact that giving an idiot a wrench won’t allow him to repair the space shuttle. God forbid you actually have to work to be healthy.

If you want a feeling of “health” for almost no effort, but a very hefty price paid, then by all means go on living like a slob and ingesting things never meant to be consumed by humans, hoping that some geeks in a laboratory paid for by obese corporate moguls will come up with a way to keep you from keeling over in five years.

If you want to feel healthy, to run for miles, copulate for hours, and know what it’s like to be alive, then learn to live healthfully, and only start expecting dividends from your investment in natural health once you’re no longer running from your own body.