What are you praying for?

I fully realize the request for prayers for people dealing with COVID-19 that occurred in my church this past Sunday was well intended, but it really hit me hard.

Why are we so susceptible to the news of the day? Why does it consume our every thought? And why can’t we, as intelligent individuals, take a step back and look at the real, big picture? I am confident in the next 700 words that we will not solve those dilemmas either, but at least we can yarn on them for a bit.

Yes, COVID-19 is an actual virus that is affecting some individuals and many families have experienced strife over it, whether directly or as a side effect of the mandates associated with it. I am not in denial about that. But have you really looked at the numbers? Quite frankly, I doubt that I need to explain to this audience the sensationalism of the whole situation, yet we ask for specific prayers. Why?

Nobody even argues that folks who are at high risk of COVID-19 are those who have other health challenges. So why are we not focusing more on the other health challenges? One that is near and dear to my heart and that of my family is diabetes. I am curious if you know what medical doctors prescribed for the prevention of diabetes before we had a plethora of drugs for “treatment.” Doctors’ prescriptions included increasing the consumption of meat and fat. Now here is a bold statement: diet, in particular animal protein and fat, is the most overlooked remedy for the prevention and cure of diabetes. 

Since we stopped giving that dietary advice for diabetes and we started treating with man-made pharmaceuticals, diabetes has sky-rocketed globally. Today, in the United States alone, 10% or 30 million Americans live with the disease. One of every 11 people on the planet live with diabetes and 3.7 million people die annually from diabetes and high blood glucose issues. And it has been reported that people with diabetes are hit harder if COVID-19 strikes them.

To me that information should be the non-stop newsreel of the day. Instead of grabbing a hold of the science that will assist in minimizing this dietary-derived disease, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Health and Department of Human Services dietary committee that reviewed the national guidelines in 2020 has openly chosen to ignore the clear science. Diabetes isn’t caused only by poor dietary choices. Clearly it could be minimized by better dietary choices.

So I am not totally gloom and doom and I do see a silver lining in the current storm of what is called a pandemic. We now have folks thinking about better bio-security with the human population that more closely emulates what animal agriculture has been doing for years. Maybe now folks will understand the need for a clean bill of health and a required “health certificate” before you may enter the country.

Folks who are at high risk will give greater consideration to the exposures they have themselves. But honestly, at the end of the day, I still don’t see the ground swell of support for individual citizens to own their own personal health and be accountable for it. That is exactly why socialized anything, including health care, doesn’t work in my mind because I don’t want to be responsible as a taxpayer for your poor diet, health and lifestyle choices. You need to own it and you need to pay for it yourself.

Clearly what I see as the best possible outcome in the 2020 health conversation is that maybe the human herd will take a page from the playbook of animal health. When I really started raising food animals in the mid 1980s, the veterinarian was someone we called on when we had a problem. Today, the veterinary profession spends more time developing prevention strategies than they do in the treatment phase. If we could bring that movement into the human health field, that is something I think fits nicely into a prayer and would be widely more beneficial.

Editor’s note: Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].