Eating and drinking

When Mr Cường stepped into the room he found his old friends all there, every face sad. How could they not be sad, since their friend Tâm had just had his knee disarticulated and lost a leg. Mr Tâm lay on the hospital bed, pale and dazed. He had spent a great deal on treatment but still had not been able to bring the glucose in his blood down. Then suddenly his foot rotted from very rapid necrosis, and the doctors had no choice but to amputate the leg in time. The doctor had comforted Mr Tâm that every 7 minutes in the world a leg is amputated because of diabetes, and he was not alone.
The friends listed how every one of them had high blood glucose and went through hard treatment. Now seeing their friend Tâm lose his leg, everyone went pale with fear for themselves. Asked, only Mr Cường did not have high blood sugar. Everyone asked in surprise for his secret.
Mr Cường said:

• My friends, as we get older, the pancreas function declines, secreting less insulin, no longer enough to regulate the amount of glucose. But the trouble is that now we have more means to eat than when we were young, so everyone wants to eat to their heart's content, eat for flavour, eat to get revenge, and eat to have the strength to play around and indulge. It is precisely because we eat more than the pancreas can regulate that diabetes appears. The result is that our legs give up on us one after another.
  Very early on I understood this, so I watch my blood sugar every day to adjust what I eat. I don't need to eat tasty food or a lot, only to eat so as not to get sick. Every day I use a personal blood glucose meter to check my glucose level and plan that day's eating. But sometimes, when I have to take antibiotics for one illness or another, the pancreas weakens quickly and glucose shoots up with no way to hold it down.
  I didn't dare eat rice, and I was thin, pale and faint with hunger. One day, feeling down, I poured soy sauce over my rice and ate it. Afterwards my blood sugar dropped very quickly. I was delighted, and for several days in a row I ate lots of rice with only soy sauce, and still the sugar was very low. It turned out that rice lowers blood sugar, but if you add more complicated food, the blood sugar rises.
  Mr Tâm opened his eyes and said faintly:
• I didn't dare eat much rice, only meat and fish, and my blood sugar kept rising. In the end even high-dose insulin injections couldn't bring it down.
• I found that eating meat weakens the pancreas very quickly, while eating rice makes the pancreas strong again. Now every day I eat two meals: at noon, rice with soy sauce to prevent illness, and in the evening I add a little nourishing food. Thanks to that my blood glucose is very good.
• If you had told me earlier, I wouldn't have had my leg sawn off.
• Don't be sad. Anyway, you still have one leg.
• I will eat your way to keep the other leg.
  The other friends cheered with joy as well 🛌

Eating is a basic human need. Eating to be full and eating tasty food are driven by instinct. All their lives people keep busy looking for ways to eat well, looking for all the ingredients to cook really delicious dishes, even if they have to kill cruelly. Delicious food makes people happy and joyful. That is instinct.
Wisdom and ethics, on the other hand, are the opposite: eating so as to be healthy, to have little illness, to cause little wrongdoing, eating so that the heart is light and at ease.
Eating is an everyday matter, and also a whole great ethic. So many consequences are tied up with eating.
What to eat, where to eat, how to eat, when to eat... there is a great deal in it.
We should eat only as much as the body needs and as the labour spent in the day requires, not eat beyond our needs so that there is surplus and it causes illness. If for some reason a meal has to be larger than we need, we should exercise more and eat less at the next meal.
If we still have to eat animal food, we should limit it and not overuse it, because science has shown that animal food easily causes cancer.
In our time people abuse chemicals in food to preserve it, to improve flavour, to make it look attractive, and all of these cause illnesses that are hard to cure. Those who produce food must also have ethics so as not to harm their fellow countrymen; sometimes the illness leaves effects across many generations.
Those who eat must also have ethics, knowing how to choose food so that their own genes remain stable and healthy, with a good influence on their descendants.
Eating to have health, eating to avoid illness: that is wise eating. Eating to be full and eating for flavour are only the instinct of enjoyment.
Beyond that we have many other philosophies of eating. Eating so that the family is warm and happy. Eating to join in with others and be cheerful. Eating with a noble style. Eating with care for everyone. Eating with thought for the poor and suffering. There is no need to eat when it is not fitting to eat.
Eating is a very earthly matter and also a very lofty one.