Supporting the Right Causes

Make sure the charity you’re supporting has goals that align with your beliefs

You may already be involved in supporting a cause close to your heart. Perhaps you’ve had a loved one affected by heart disease or lost someone close to you from another devastating illness. Perhaps you seek to help our society prevent these terrible sicknesses.

It’s important to consider how you’re supporting these organisations. Increasingly, I see displays on shop counters selling a bag of sweets or a flapjack to support diabetes research or help heart disease. It seems to me to be a bit like selling cigarettes to raise money for lung cancer research! These treats with their high sugar content, artificial colours and preservatives contribute to the disease, yet they’re being sold to raise money to help treat it! It just doesn’t make sense.

What Can I Do?

Instead, consider sponsoring a run or walk, or hold a jumble sale to benefit a cause. Research your charitable institutions to find one that is concerned with health and illness prevention. So many are focused on detection and treatment of an illness, rather than looking to the root cause of the illness and working to prevent people from being affected by it.

Finding a Good Match

A while back, we were faced with needing to choose a cause to support in the Great North Run. We struggled for a long time to come up with a charity we were happy to support because we wanted to find one that wasn’t concerned with treating the problem after it’s already occurred.

We finally settled on Guide Dogs for the Blind. It wasn’t health-related, but it made more sense than contributing to an organisation that waits for someone to get ill and then fills them with drugs to treat it. Of course treatments are still necessary, and thank goodness they do exist so that if someone close to us develops a disease, they have something to turn to. But the people that should fund the research into new drugs are the pharmaceutical companies that stand to make billions from them if successful.

Think Prevention, Not Treatment

Raising money by selling sweets that contribute towards contracting diseases is illogical. There’s no place for these unhealthy foods in our society, let alone to raise money towards a devastating illness. Naturally, we can’t eat healthy all the time, and all of us like to enjoy a sweet treat every now and again. We can just try to be aware of cooking with real food and ingredients when we have a craving for sweets. Knowing that what we put in our bodies is a major contributing factor to illness, is key to working on prevention