Hard Cell
Book summary
In telling the story of how today's industrialised food systems - from farm to fork - undermine our health at a cellular level, Hard Cell provides an escape route back to health. It empowers the reader to make informed choices about what is best for them individually, and for the world as a whole.
Hard Cell throws wide the shutters, and allows fresh air and sunlight into the murky corners of the food-marketing world. It is a book that will help people understand how the food decisions they make are manipulated for the benefit of large corporations, why this impacts our health so negatively and how we can re-ignite our super-power (aka the choices we make each day) to re-connect with a more natural way of being and, in so doing, create a healthier and happier world.
We are facing un-precedented rates of obesity and diabetes. Eight out of the ten biggest killers on the planet are related to the food we eat. Chronic lifestyle disease costs billions and kills millions across the planet; it is a startling fact that food-related, aka non-communicable diseases (NCDs) kill 41 million people each year, equivalent to 74% of all deaths globally.
But it doesn't have to be like this.
We each have the power of choice (I like to think of it as our super-power). And exactly because choice makes us powerful, it has been subverted to push us towards unhealthy choices that profit the food corporations, and undermine our health. We have now reached the point where convenience and taste are the major drivers of our food choices; food is considered more for its entertainment value, than as the life and health giver that it is. And we are all getting sicker as a result.
Super-markets seem to carry an array of different and enticing packaged foods but when we look closely at the ingredients they are all just alternative combinations of the same six ingredients - wheat, corn, soy, dairy, sugar and seed oils, with a side order of preservatives, colourings and chemicals thrown in. This is false choice, not real choice.
The joy though, is that we have bodies that are designed to heal and an inner guidance system that, when not over-ridden by chemicals, sugar, starch and seed oils, has been magnificently engineered to help us stay healthy. But we are not given the opportunity to connect into that innate power for healing because our systems are constantly over-burdened and over-stimulated by the false choices offered up by the food industry, and modern life in general.
Hard Cell provides the input we need to make informed choices and a step-by-step methodology to help us resist the pressure to buy the foods that do not serve us, overcome the addiction to sugar and starch that we all struggle with and step into the power of choosing what is good for us, instead of what is good for the 1%.
The image (by the brilliant David Goodsell) is of insulin in action. The food we eat determines whether insulin works for us or against us (as in the case of Type II Diabetes). Owing to its role in managing appetite, fat storage and blood sugar, Insulin is the perfect poster-boy for a food-system that doesn't work.
About The Author
Fran McElwaine
Formally a C-Suite Executive advising some of the world's largest food manufacturing corporations, Fran faced down her own health crisis, and had to re-think her whole approach to food and health. This led to a new career as a Functional Health Practitioner in which she has helped hundreds of people prevent or reverse chronic lifestyle disease. As poacher turned gamekeeper she is in a unique position to shine a light on why and how the food industry offers up false choices, the negative impact this has on our health, and exactly what we can do about it.