Perspectives in Jaina Philosophy and Culture

Author(s): Satish Jain, Kamalchand Sogani
Publisher: Ahimsa International

Page 79

Food, Health And Jainism
Dr Dhananjay Gunde
Food has a very important role to play in the day-to-day life of every living organism Hence it is not surprising that animals, plants, insects etc spend most of their time in various processes connected with food, namely, finding food, cating it, assimilating or storing it Man is not an exception to this (If you ask anybody, 'Why do you work l' his immcdiatc reply would be, 'For the sake of food ') When food plays such an important role in our life, it is obligatory on our part to know the scientific aspects of food Why do we need food ?
It is very surprising that though we strive so much to carn our food, we do not know precisely why we have to cat Well, most people think that we derive cnergy (calories) from the assimilation of food, and this cncrgy is required for all our day-to-day activity A hardworking blacksmith for instance has to cat more than a person doing sedentary clerical work Well, they are not wrong, though their knowledge is incompletc If an adequate supply of calorics was the sole aim of eating food, then half a kilo of sugar every day would have been sufficient But we know that man cannot survive by cating only sugar He needs a balanced diet
Why do we need a balanced diet ?
It is very interesting to note that our body is continuously changing Though our body looks as if it is one unit, it is not so It is composed of innumerable tissues like skin, muscles, bones, nerves, blood etc These tissues are made of trillions and trillions of very minute cells It is estimated that the number of cells in one adult body is equal to the number of world population multiplied by 17,000 The second important point about our cells is that different tissuecells have got differnt life spans For example, a red blood corpuscle (RBC) has got a life of 3 weeks, a skin cell has got a life of a few hours to few weeks In the same way bone and muscle cells have got different life-spans
It is estimated that every second 12 million RB Cs die, and those many RBCs are newly produced In one's life-time half a ton of RB Cs are pro