What links these three Community Initiatives is metabolic health for the extension of healthy lifespan (aka healthspan) and the prevention chronic disease (including dementia), in that each initiative concerns: (a) what we put in our mouths, why, when (at what times and in what order) and how (how fast and how thoroughly chewed) ; and (b) how we reduce levels of the stress hormone, Cortisol, in our bodies – both in ways neither that government action nor telling people to “eat less and exercise more” can or will ever achieve, and, in contrast, with real community involvement, enthusiasm, encouragement and support at the heart of their success.
(1) Everything to do with improving health, healthy lifespan and wider wellbeing . . . including, for instance,
- preventing and, in some cases, reversing chronic diseases like pre-diabetes, Type 2 diabetes and dementia, and
- reducing (or, ideally eliminating) the worrying prevalence of vaping among local children currently as young as seven years of age;
(2) Everything to do with improving people’s sense of personal safety and security . . . including, for instance,
- reducing domestic violence,
- improving family law outcomes,
- dealing with the profoundly stressful and damaging effects of Margaret Thatcher’s Section 21 No Fault Evictions clause in her hastily developed Housing Act 1988, which has, amazingly, still not been repealed despite over 14 years of cross-party support for doing so
in short, systematically reducing the major causes of chronic stress and fear in people’s lives locally, as a beacon for what can be achieved despite government inaction and incompetence;
(3) Everything to do with developing our local area as the ‘real food’ and ‘food enterprise’ capital of the UK . . . including, for instance,
- creating more ‘good jobs’ (with fair pay and future security) and
- establishing a flourishing ‘Incredible Edible’ group – see Pam Warhurst’s short TED Talk at https://tinyurl.com/yxjja2n5
Interestingly, there are two common threads linking these three, inspirational ‘Community Initiatives’, namely that they each:
(a) Address issues that no party-politically-driven government is likely address anytime soon – at least, not until, we the people, successfully insist on the delivery of significant improvements to today’s dysfunctional political system in Westminster over the life of the next Parliament.
(b) Directly tackle the underlying root cause of today’s prevalence of chronic disease by systematically improving the metabolic health of our local population, and we’d be delighted to say more about this vital aspect of our three Community Initiatives in due course.
Indeed, we’re confident that demonstrably improving the metabolic health of our community can be made to matter to a significant proportion of people locally once they’ve been presented with incontrovertible evidence showing that the ‘do-nothing’ alternative of allowing today’s worsening trends in chronic disease prevalence to persist will mean that our much-loved NHS will cease to be affordable as a ‘service free at the point of use’ within most people’s lifetimes.