THE BODY AS A TRUE MIRACLE

To me, the body itself is an absolute masterpiece.
For many people it is something natural and normal. But for what it achieves day after day, it deserves the greatest recognition. Unfortunately, reality often looks very different: instead of caring for it, nurturing it, and rewarding it, we overwhelm it and push it to its limits. To put it bluntly, then we often should not be surprised. That is why my first approach here is specifically to place the focus on that.

In simple terms: our brain, our heart, our entire musculoskeletal system, our eyes, all our organs—how they function—the body performs at the highest level. Whether we sleep or work, it functions.

We just forget that our bodies were not originally designed for today’s world.

Never before has humanity been exposed to such speed and constant change as today. The human body is simply not able to adapt fast enough to these new conditions.

If we take only a few examples: in the Stone Age there were no restaurants, no delivery services, no stove as we know it today, no refrigerator, no microwave. There were no supermarkets, no convenience food, no packaged long-life products. There were no means of transport—but also no doctors or hospitals. People were on their own and experienced longer periods of hunger, which they learned to handle.

Nowadays we have few, or very short, breaks between meals. We can access food whenever we feel even a small hunger. At the same time, we often lack movement: we use transport to get where we want to go. As adults we often sit eight hours a day at a computer; children and teenagers sit in school.

Then the digital world comes on top of that—computer, phone, iPad, television—and all of it continues in our free time. It has even become mobile, so we can take it with us on vacation and everywhere we go. So there is no digital detox in sight.

In the past, you had to use your body, otherwise there was no food—meat had to be hunted, fruit, roots, and mushrooms had to be gathered. Later, when people became more settled, they worked the fields and practiced agriculture.

Until the so-called “sitting human” existed—the office job—practically all people, and all our animal ancestors, were physically active for many hours every day for hundreds of millions of years.

Today, it is usually different—and the result is clear: the body is chronically underchallenged, and the muscles suffer. They become weak and shorten, leading to poor posture and, of course, pain. The lumbar spine suffers—originally intended to support upright walking, but not suited for prolonged sitting. Our feet, originally meant to walk without shoes, also suffer.

The eyes suffer too. To stay healthy, they would need to look into the distance much more often. But because of the digital world, we spend many hours looking at devices that are very close to our eyes.

Our metabolism also depends on movement. If we do not move, that can be the starting point for issues like diabetes—similar “diseases of prosperity” are on the rise.

In summary, the consequences of all these changes since the Stone Age contribute to the development of today’s lifestyle diseases.

Yes, we have the option today to go to a doctor and, in the best case, get help with medication. But I would love it if we took one step back and tried not to get to that point in the first place. We humans tend to change only when we notice that something is wrong.

And that is exactly why children are so close to my heart. They can do it better—and it is our task as parents to help them do that.