There’s been a lot of talk about what the right health care for this country should look like. But in all the things that I’ve read and heard, I’m not yet convinced that any of the options, present or proposed, would really make any difference for our population.

The need to encourage awareness of people’s own choices, and to understand the need for reform at the governmental level is grossly omitted from the picture. The decision making by the FDA to approve certain items that can be taken into the body needs a major overhaul. There is no health plan that won’t eventually bankrupt the wallets of hard-working people as long as the cheaper (more economical) grocery store choices can be major factors of obesity. And that only scratches the surface of other ills resulting from many rulings of the FDA, like: unknown genetically-modified food effects, aggressive marketing to children for food full of food coloring, toxic preservatives in vaccinations, etc. Over the long term these choices can get people into a culture of medications and the subsequent taking of other medications to counter side effects. This is living proof that we are, at our essence, an unhealthy nation.

Government’s role in the healthy guidance of proper diet is nowhere in the legislation of health care reform. Given the current state of national debt, we need to re-adopt the adage of “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This way we could spend less “ounces” of federal dollars trying to solve such a behemoth issue in this country.

Before we can start on the path to a new national balanced diet, we must first work on the individual balanced lifestyle. We need to move away from the daily extremes that carry us away and find more sustainable choices. Some can go the path of making better external choices to affect the inner workings of the mind, and others can bring consciousness to the mind to then start making better choices. Either way, the current road of unhealthy choices needs an off ramp to start seeing a country’s landscape full of people who understand that being American means we’re intelligent, flexible and can be role models for each other and the world at large.

To your health! Keitan