Wilson and I slept poorly last night. Well, that's an understatement -- we woke up frequently throughout the night -- at times, acknowledging our joint insomnia and at other times, pretending to be asleep. Our rough night of sleep was puzzling. We had better than normal sleeping conditions in Cuenca, Ecudaor -- our hotel bed was more comfortable than usual, there were no loud street noises, and it was one of our very few accommodations where the room did not have some sort of annoying ambient light. What we didn't realize was that there was a smoke detector in the room emitting irregular quiet beeps and those irregular beeps were most likely the unknown cause of our sleep distress. I only noticed the beeps in the late morning. I couldn't believe that we hadn't heard the first beep from that smoke detector when we first entered the room.
 |
| Cuenca, Ecuador |
Our failure to notice that omnipresent (and very annoying) noise made me think about other unseen unnoticed elements that infiltrate our health and wellbeing. These elements can be anything from the particulates that we breath in on a city run to an undiagnosed health condition that remains undiagnosed because the person simply suffers through it. Most of the time, we think of the obvious health infiltrators such as germs like rhinovirus or giarrdhia that make us sick from improper sanitation. But the unseen and infamous ones can be just as, or more, potent.
 |
| Caja National Park |
While traveling, I spend a fair amount of effort trying to avoid or battle the obvious "infiltrators". Armed with hand sanitizer, ciproflocaccin, and my personal favorite -- zinc, we've been relatively successful in avoiding or battling sickness. Knock on wood. But beyond these obvious battles for health, there is another long-term health infiltrator that I have been thinking about lately-- trans-fat.
Trans-fat or partially hydrogenated oils is a human created fat from either corn or soybeans that is ubiquitous in American (and now global) snack food. Trans-fat lengthens processed snacks' shelf life. Unfortunately our bodies also have hard time breaking down these fats. In fact, some people argue that our bodies just continue to store these fats and that is why trans-fat is a leading contributor to heart disease, lowers good cholesterol, and increases bad cholesterol. Research has also confirmed that trans-fat plays a role in body inflammation and body inflammation has been linked to increased sports injuries and even cancer.
While we have been traveling, I have been thinking about transfats because there are processed snack foods everywhere! Including my fave- OREOs (or Oreitos). These processed snack foods are all too accessible when we are running to catch a bus or on a bus all day. Especially as a pescatarian (a vegetarian who eats fish), my 'fast food' options are limited. I have had a hard time finding non-meat unprocessed options. I have also recently discovered that my reliance on french fries and fried fish while traveling might also contribute to my trans-fat consumption, a lot of cheap oils used for trying that 30 cent batch of french fries contain trans-fat oil as well.
Thus, surprisingly, buying Oreitos might be an okay health option (amongst processed foods) in a pinch, because Oreos removed trans-fats from the cookies in 2006. And from my broken Spanish, it seems that they did not reinclude transfat in their South American distribution. But eating Oreos instead of local french fries seems troubling from a global, environmental, and local business perspective. Ugh...infilitration of Trans National Companies or trans-fat! I just hope at the next bus stop that I can find some of the healthier fast-food options we've seen in Ecuador -- bananas, apples, bread "integral", and oranges. Wish we were here during mango season.
Posted with Blogsy
No comments:
Post a Comment