"Every minute of every day your body is renewing itself. Humans bodies have about 100 trillion cells. Each day, millions of cells in our bodies die and new ones replace them. The quality of the new cells determines our health in the future. Your cells are affected by the foods you eat, the water you drink, the air you breathe, sunshine and anything that gets into your body through the skin. Exercise, rest, your environment and stress can also affect the quality of these cells and the health and strength of your body.
The frequency at which these cells are replaced differs in various types of bodily tissues. Some tissues regenerate very quickly and some take years. Except for our brain and certain parts of the nervous system, we actually regenerate a new body every seven years. Most of our cells are replaced within that time.
When you were seven years old, you had a very different body from when you were first born. When you were fourteen, you were in another new body. Hormones influenced you and helped you to grow taller and more like a young adult than a child. By the time you were 21 you were in an adult body. This body was totally different from the one you were born with or the one you will have when you are 70 years old.
Just as hormones influence the changes in your body, so does everything else that you do. Foods that you eat are the materials that form the body's building blocks. When you eat an unhealthy food you are affecting more than your waistline. You are having an effect on the health of the new body that you will have seven years from now. Every time you exercise you are increasing your potential for a stronger body in the future. Each time you smoke a cigarette, drink a glass of alcohol or take a harmful drug you are poisoning your body and increasing your chances of developing diseased cells. Excess stress can prevent the cells from forming perfectly. The life force is continually regenerating you and you can directly influence your health and the body that you have in the future. By incorporating certain wellness practices you can get your body to build stronger, healthier cells as it replaces the old ones.
When your body regenerates new cells do you want them to be healthy cells or diseased cells? Your actions can make the difference! You have the power to create illness or health in your own body. With active prevention you take action to encourage your body to be healthy. There are many techniques for this such as proper nutrition, regular exercise, fresh air and sunshine and abstaining from poisons such as alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. Anti-stress techniques such as deep breathing and meditation can also create wellness in your body and can help you to ward off disease."
To read more on this subject please read this article from the New Scientist.
" Our cells are literally flushed out, and rebuilt with new cells.
Depending on what source you read (from Dr. Deepak Chopra, MD to Gray’s Anatomy), our body replace its tissues and cells every 1 to 7 years.
- Muscles get replaced every 6 months to 3 years
- The pancreas replaces every 5-12 months
- Our bones replace every 8 months to 4 years
- Red blood cells replace every 90-120 days
- The intestinal lining replaces every 5-30 days
Realize, we have been doing this regeneration every day since the day we were first conceived."
- By Scott Ohlgren
click the link on this photo for more on the science of "you are what you eat"
This topic has been a source of inspiration for me for a long time...
When you look at this information and you look at the fact that you literally are what you eat, then the perception that if one was to move to a new bioregion or ecoregion then one would literally be composed of this ecoregion within a seven year period.
We are composed of our ecoregions and bioregions... our cells are designed by place, even our DNA is composed of the foods we eat.
Eating bioregionaly helps to adapt one to ones bioregion, because you are literally building your body out of it. Feeding your children a bioregional diet also helps with this process...
So much of the foods we eat are from other places this is such an ecologically and socially destructive practice, but it also confuses our very being! One example... Eating local Bee pollen can help one defend against pollen allergies... but only if the Bee pollen is from local bees.
If one only wanted to look at this from a purely metaphorical level, just knowing that you are composed of the foods from the bioregion you live as a part of... just looking at your own body would help remind you that you are one with the land and sky and waters of your land. The actual act of obtaining food bioregionaly to build your body from the land up actually facilitates the maintaining and developing of relationships, which as we all know is the basis of animist ontology.
Eating locally also helps us reconcile our sense of not belong to a place of not being native to place, as well as our sense of loss as to a identity based on regionality, and BEING native to place. If we know that our body is composed of the land helps to foster being native again, just knowing that our cells die and are reborn only to be built from what we put in it, puts a new spin on the word native, which in its most literal definition means to be born of a place... to be of a place, or to be from a place... and if one is eating foods from ones life place and ones cells are deign and being reborn... after seven years of living in a place you are that place... literally!
You really are what you EAT, and if you eat Bioregionaly, go our side look around and say to your self with pride, I AM THAT! I am the land talking and thinking and reading this about its self right now! How wondrous!
The simple act of eating can facilitate a ecological sense of self and identity based on place... to me this breaks down concepts of race, ethnicity, cultural identity and brings it down to the earth...LITERALLY! And is a basis for bioregional animist based identity and cultural.
So become a localvour! Think globally eat locally!
