On a deep intuitive level, we are concerned in Egypt as elsewhere, about the loss of traditional lifestyles and eating habits that have survived for countless generations only to be supplanted in a few decades by new habits. This example, recounted by Andrew Weil can help explain why we are right to be concerned about changing aspects of human connectedness in our modern societies:
<<... Human connectedness is a most powerful healer, capable of neutralizing many harmful influences on the material plane.
A much-publicized example is the story of the Italian-Americans of Roseto Pennsylvania, with their lower-than-expected incidence of coronary heart disease. The town was populated by immigrants from two villages in Northern Italy, who came to America in the 1930s seeking better lives. They were a very close-knit community comprising large extended families with strong social bonds. They ate a lot of calories, meat, and fat, and many smoked tobacco; nonetheless, they had few heart attacks. But their children, now in their fifties and sixties and eating the same diets, have the same incidence of coronary heart disease as other Americans.
What changed from the first to the second generation?
Researchers who studied these people felt that the most significant difference was the loss of extended family and community: the younger generation lives in typical nuclear families, with all the social isolation characteristic of modern life. Somehow, the high level of connectedness in the first generation of immigrants protected them from the expected ill effects of high-fat-diets and smoking. I classify that kind of beneficial interaction between human beings as a spiritual phenomenon, one that is lacking in the lives of many sick people I see as patients.>>
In the chapter Mind and Spirit of Spontaneous Healing, by American health guru Dr. Andrew Weil.
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