Have you ever noticed how the longer husbands and wives are together, the more they start to look like each other? I have, and it seems to hold true with every couple. I don’t know if it’s so much their facial characteristics as maybe the clothes they wear, or hairstyles, or the fact that they pick up each other’s mannerisms and turns of phrase. Whatever the cause, it seems to happen to everyone. But have you ever stopped to think how sometimes, married couples get the same illnesses?
Of course we share the cold and flu with our spouses, but it goes deeper than that.
There are certain illnesses that come about through malnutrition. Take scurvy, for instance, which is something we don’t see a lot of in this country. It’s caused by lack of vitamin C, which most of us consume in sufficient quantities. But some of us don’t get enough iron, which leads to anemia. Or we eat too much salt, which can lead to hypertension. Or we eat too much white flour and sugar, which bleach calcium out of our bones. As married couples eat many of their meals together and are eating the same foods, they will have a tendency to develop the same types of weaknesses.
There are other illnesses that are caused by viruses that we share. We can easily transmit pink eye to each other. Because we sleep in such close proximity to each other, we are sharing the same air all night long, and little germs and things float back and forth between us.
I’m not saying all this to suggest that we should have a different bedroom from our spouse. I’m suggesting that as we look at our health, we might look at our spouse as well. If we get an illness, we might want to make sure our spouse takes preventative measures. If we develop a condition based on foods we’re eating, we might evaluate to see how those foods are affecting our spouse. We’ve been told to become one as we get married, and I think that also applies to staying healthy—it’s so easy to transmit illnesses, let’s be sure that we’re both getting the treatment we need for our conditions and to do our best to keep from sharing with our spouses.
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8 Things to Do to Avoid a Cold or Flu
Driving the Family Germ-mobile