Last week, we touched on food storage and methods to start a food cache, as well as some comments on gardening and networking. One thing that got touched upon but not in depth, (as with most of my rambling generalities) was making sure that your cache allowed you to have both variety and proper nutrition. I don't keep much in the way of processed foods in my cache. Peanut butter is probably the most processed thing I store and use.
Why bring up nutrition when talking about emergencies? The one thing you'll always have with you in an emergency ... is you. If you've lost your emergency kits, if you're stranded in the wilderness after a mudslide or avalanche, if you're digging through the rubble after a tornado, the most important piece of emergency equipment you've got is your own body. To be properly prepared, you need to be as fit and healthy as you can make yourself.
Hygiene
While I'm an athiest, I'm perfectly willing to steal good ideas from religious folks. Here's one: Cleanliness is next to Godliness. While Godliness can be a mental and spiritual support for believers in times of stress, Cleanliness is your friend, day in and day out. Most of you probably stay as clean as your circumstances allow, but if not, it's time to work on those good habits your caregivers tried to drill into you as a kid.
The world is a dirty place, full of microbes that would love nothing more than to find a nice warm, moist place to live and reproduce, and you're the bees knees of luxury hotels to them. Your body is already crawling with bacteria, both inside and out. Some are actually beneficial to you, some are harmful. The beneficial ones aid you to digest certain foods and help you kill off some of the harmful ones. The harmful ones work to digest YOU - to damage your cells, steal the nutrients within, and possibly allow viruses to sneak into the cells and take over the cells' reproductive cycles to make more viruses. I can't think of any natural viruses that are beneficial off the top of my head, as viruses are basically little terrorists coming in to hijack cell protein synthesis for their own needs.
So in order to keep your cells healthy and happy, you need to help keep down the population of harmful bacteria and nasty little viruses you're in contact with. Number one way? Handwashing If you spent a day watching yourself, you'd probably go crazy, but you'd also notice that almost everything you come into contact with (unless you have a really MESSY job) is through your hands. You may rest your arms on surfaces, lean up against things, and so on, but really your hands come into contact with more and different surfaces that are covered in bacteria than any other part of you. Doorknobs, railings, carts, push bars, tables, keyboards, you touch hundreds of surfaces on a given day, many already touched by all sorts of other people.
In general, the more you wash your hands, the healthier you'll be. In the hospital, your health care providers SHOULD be washing their hands any time they come into your room intending to touch you, and when they leave your room if they've touched you or your bedding. (Assuming you aren't under isolation precautions that require them to be gloved when they're in with you, in which case they'll put on gloves beforehand and pitch them as they exit the room.)
Ideally (and most of us fail to reach ideal states) you should be washing your hands before going to the restroom, and definitely after. Hopefully, if you're in a public place, they'll have disposable paper towels, and a trashcan by the door. Because after having just washed your hands, the last thing you want to do is grab that door handle that all the people that didn't wash their hands just grabbed. Use that paper towel to shield you from touching the surface, and pitch it in the trash as you leave. Your goal is not to touch ANYTHING in the restroom apart from the sanitary paper towels once you've washed your hands.
Wash your hands before eating or preparing food as well, and after preparing foods. Proper handwashing requires soap and water, and takes at least 20-30 seconds. Temperature isn't actually all that important, as you're not trying to boil the critters to death; you'd kill your own skin cells first. The only way temperature helps is in that many chemical reactions take place faster when warmer. You're just trying to wash the microbes off physically. Use vigourous hand motions, swirling your hands all over each other, being sure to get in between fingers and scrape your fingernails against your palms to try and knock loose anything under your nails.
Your skin is remarkably good at keeping out viruses and bacteria when whole, but allowing them to grow on you for any length of time without scrubbing down allows them to work at piercing your skin, creating infections that your body expend vital resources to combat. So shower or bathe at least daily if you can, and after any activity that leaves you soiled in any way. Pay attention to your feet, too. Many folks basically ignore the feet, but the repeated pressure of walking leads to development of thick calluses which are prone to cracking around the heels, and many modern shoes are improperly ventilated, leading to moisture retention that is perfect for bacterial growth.
All these nasty little invaders need to break through the surfaces that protect you from the outside world. When you think about skin, you generally think about the outside lining, but it's inside you too...and now we're heading.
Your mouth is even better suited for bacterial growth than most of the rest of your skin. It's nice and warm, wet, and you stick nutrients in at intervals. If you're like me, you stick far too much sugar in, in one form or another. Your mouth is basically a petri dish for bacterial growth, and proper dental care is an absolute must in order to stay healthy. Like handwashing, the only time there's such a thing as 'too much' brushing of your teeth is when it becomes obsessive-compulsive. Brush at the very least morning and night. Brushing after anything you eat is probably best. Newer toothpastes even include ingredients that are supposed to repair tooth enamel that's been damaged. A good guide to choosing a toothpaste, brush, and brushing is provided here.
Be sure and brush your tongue as well as your teeth, and a quick run over the upper palate probably won't hurt either. Floss Flossing can actually make more of a difference than brushing, if you're forgetful about brushing.
The cherry on the sundae of dental care is mouthwash. After you've brushed and flossed to break loose as much of the bacteria and byproducts of bacterial growth as you can, you ideally want to use a mouthwash to try and kill off whatever remains. Most mouthwashes are alcohol-based, as alcohols can dissolve through certain bacterial membranes, killing the bacteria once the cell wall is breached, but it takes about 30 seconds to do so, which is why commercials always show people swishing and swishing and swishing.
Ok, so you're now squeaky clean from head to toe, so now it's time to get dirty again.
Exercise
Most of us don't get enough. Some of us get plenty, just doing the jobs we do to keep ourselves alive. For those that fall into the former category, such as those of us in IT desk jobs, we need to do something more than our work to keep ourselves in any kind of useful shape. (Note, this is the hypocritical part of the diary, because I've just finally started working out again after 8 yrs of desk potatohood.)
Your strength and endurance might be the difference between life and death in an emergency, both for you and those around you. If you can't shift a heavy joist in a house on fire, or transfer the food and water you need to a vehicle during an evacuation, things might just not go so well for you. If you're truly going to be prepared, you need to be as physically fit as you can become. As an added bonus, you can save a lot of money by being fit and healthy.
It may seem redundant, but healthy people get sick less ;) By which I mean that if you stay in decent physical condition, you will be able to fight off the infections that plague us all, and not have colds and flus drag on and on. You'll also avoid a host of conditions that arise as a result of the body being in suboptimal condition. Obesity leads to all sorts of nastiness. If you're obese in middle age, you're more likely to develop heart disease, Alzheimer's, dementia, diabetes, vascular disease and a host of other chronic problems that will make you die younger and not enjoy the years you do live.
And, in this age of ever increasing medical expenses, you'll be more likely to stave off medical expense related financial collapse. Preventative maintenance is far less costly than repairing a breakdown in a system, whether it be a car, a house, or a human body.
You can go to a gym, you can buy expensive equipment, or you can simply do productive physical labor. Gardening can be quite physical. Because I'm gardening on a home level, and not planting a farm, I use muscle power. I dig and turn my beds by shovel, I cart compost around and haul watering cans around. This gives me some exercise, doesn't create any particular pollution, since I'm not using powered equipment, and has the added benefit of producing food to save me money at the store. Later in the summer I'll get even more of a workout hiking around the nearby woods picking wild raspberries.
I recently started walking to and from work as well. My previous 5-10 minute one way car commute now takes 35-60 minutes, but gives me a nice, if sweaty workout, and allows me to listen to birdsong, admire flowers, and even occasionally watch some deer at play as I did on Friday morning. Added bonus? Saving money on gasoline and not adding to the CO2 imbalance in the atmosphere. The same when I walk to the store and carry groceries back. Even without special equipment, you can be doing the old standbys that have served generations of military personnel. Pushups, crunches / situps, jumping jacks, squats, walking/running/jogging and the like will keep you fit.
If you're really ambitious and maybe have a bit of mechanical skill, you could even try converting a stationary bike into a generator, and store up a bit of power every time you exercise.
Nutrition
Ok, finally rambling back to where we started last week. It's food, folks. While multivitamins sound good, and you may want to use them, some studies seem to suggest that much of what comes out of a pill passes pretty much straight through you, leading to just really expensive urine. Your gut isn't really expecting a small lump of straight vitamins and minerals. It's expecting food, which means carbohydrates, proteins and fats. It's got all sorts of neat little mechanisms to convert and break down those substances, carry them into your bod, and strip off any attached vitamins and minerals and send them where needed in your body. So the best way to stay where you need to be nutritionally is to give your body what it expects to see.
This can be tough to do. I know of at least one Kossack who said his family is down to one meal a day as they struggle to make ends meet, and many others who have talked about scrimping and stretching their food budgets to the breaking point and beyond. It's heartbreaking up close, and really too depressing for words when you realize that hundreds of millions of people around the world are malnourished or outright starving for lack of resources. For the sake of argument, though, we're going to assume here that you have at least some resources to expend to maintain a healthy diet following the suggested nutritional guidelines.
And by healthy, I mean as healthy as you can. Cut back on preprocessed foods as much as possible. Avoid sugary things. Cut out those carbonated drinks if you're an addict. Buy or grow raw fruits and vegetables. Even if you're not a vegetarian (and if you are, you might want to actually pick up some B-complex vitamins), at least two thirds of what you eat should probably be plant-based.
Yes, you have both teeth and a digestive tract that allow you to eat meat as well as vegetables, but it's still tough to digest and high amounts in your diet increase the chances of cancers of the gastrointestinal tract, not to mention that many of our favorite cooking techniques leave some darned unsavory chemical compunds on cooked meat, such as carcinogenic benzene rings that form during grilling of meats.
Meat, especially fatty meat, is packed full of energy. Fat gives you the most calories and the fewest other nutrients you need. Most of us consume far too many calories already, but don't get enough nutrition, thanks to the wonders of processed foods that contain crap like corn syrup. Fast food, for those who can afford it, is probably the worst thing you can be eating. I won't go into the conditions of many animals that wind up in slaughterhouses and are then turned into burgers at chains, but if you've got a really strong stomach, you might want to watch a video online called 'Earthlings'
to see just what's going into processed meats. (Warning: the film is an hour and a half of explicit video footage of the ways in which humans abuse our fellow inhabitants of this world.) Every time I watch it, I go vegetarian for a while, but I backslide over time, to my own disgust.
Unless you're doing so much physical labour that you actually need the extra calories, such as working a farm, step away from the fat. If you're cooking steaks, trim off the fat you can see before cooking them. Try to work beef and pork out of your diet, substituting in poultry and fish. If you're already down the scale to poultry and fish, good for you. Now start working out the poultry and getting more of your protein from beans, nuts, seeds, lentils and the like.
Not only will you be eating healthier, but as your waist shrinks, your wallet will stay fuller longer. And you'll be helping the planet too, as it takes a lot more energy to raise those cows and pigs than it does beans. I believe I heard each pound of beef requires something like 10 pounds of grain. So the fewer cattle we raise for food, the more grain we can export to countries going through food shortages.
I'll still suggest you eat some fish maybe once a week if you can afford it, for some nutrients that are harder to come by here on land. Try using the Safe Seafood Selector from the environmental defense fund, or another such chart to see which is safe to eat. There's another chart floating out there that goes into the number of portions you can have in any given time to be safe in terms of mercury and PCB's, but I've lost my link :( (Anyone got it?)
Mens sana in corpore sano
A healthy mind, in a healthy body. Brings back images of turn of the (last) century Victorians with Indian clubs and walrus moustaches for me. But the phrase is ever more apt. Long term stress is one of the most common chronic afflictions in modern life. We're stressed over living paycheck to paycheck. We're stressed about human rights abuses by our own government. We're stressed about the sheer volume of pollution we're helping to put into the environment and the ways in which we're destroying the environment.
And that cumulative stress physically affects our body. Rates of depression are high, mental illness is on the rise, people become apathetic of feelings of futility to meaningfully affect the world. And with that apathy come tendencies to withdraw, to do less, to move less. Obesity increases, giving another stressor, and keeping the vicious cycle of mental and physical decline on the roll.
Exercise itself is good for breaking out of some of that depression and stress, and of course, if you're reading this on DailyKos, you're an likely an activist of some sort already. Help your brain to destress more. Read. Reading exercises the brain, creating new neural connections and strengthening old. As your brain focuses on things, your autonomic nervous system increases blood flow, shunting more energy and oxygen to help out.
Meditate on the things you want. Envision the planet as you want it to be, how you want to affect it. Consider simple ways to lessen your footprint on the earth, and do them. With each step you take, you reinforce your sense of empowerment and accomplishment, reinforcing the notion that you have worth, and you have the ability to be a force for change and for good in the world. (And hey, maybe you'd look good in a cape and tights! Personally, I love those high 'Ming the Merciless' style collars, and am much disappointed that I don't know any super heroes that wear them. So much for my Halloween, snap.)
Spend time with friends, or start talking to people you think you might like as friends. We're all social animals, whether or not we see ourselves as such. Developing relationships and communities not only helps your mental and emotional health, but strengthens everyone involved, giving more sources of help in times of need. Cooperation raises people up, competition cuts them down.
And, finally, know yourself. Know your limitations, as well as your abilities. Know what you can and can't do before emergencies strike. Self-reflection will make you more efficient as making critical decisions correctly in short periods of time. Identify the things about yourself you like, identify the things about you that you dislike, and try and figure out how to change them to build your self-confidence, self-esteem, and survivability.
That's it for Chapter 2 of Survival Sundays. We're veering around a bit wildly as I try to establish the direction I want to take here, as the direction I had originally intended to go was covered in EXTREME detail back in 2005 by AlphaGeek. If you want to skip to the hardcore survivalism, and learn exactly which batteries to keep on hand, what type of power supplies, etc, read his excellent 5 part series here.
Other Kossack resources more in tune with this particular chapter:
Fitness Monday
Running Sunday
(or you can do what I did, and just go up to your browser location bar, type in www.dailykos.com/tag/ and put a keyword like exercise, health, or fitness after that last slash to get a roundup of good diaries ;)