I know you. We have a lot in common. You have been doing some reading and now you are pretty sure everything in the grocery store and your kitchen cupboards is going to kill you.
Before Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:
I eat pretty healthy. Check it out: whole grain crackers, veggie patties, prawns, broccoli. I am actually pretty into clean eating.
After Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:
Those crackers – gluten, baby. Gluten is toxic to your intestinal health, I read it on a forum. They should call those crackers Leaky Gut Crisps, that would be more accurate. That veggie burger in the freezer? GMO soy. Basically that’s a Monsanto patty. Did you know soybean oil is an insecticide? And those prawns are fish farmed in Vietnamese sewage pools. I didn’t know about the sewage fish farming when I bought them, though, really I didn’t!
The broccoli, though..that’s ok. I can eat that. Eating that doesn’t make me a terrible person, unless….oh, shit! That broccoli isn’t organic. That means it’s covered with endocrine disrupting pesticides that will make my son sprout breasts. As if adolescence isn’t awkward enough.
And who pre-cut this broccoli like that? I bet it was some poor Mexican person not making a living wage and being treated as a cog in an industrial broccoli cutting warehouse. So I’m basically supporting slavery if I eat this pre-cut broccoli. Oh my God, it’s in a plastic bag too. Which means I am personally responsible for the death of countless endangered seabirds right now.
I hate myself.
Well, shit.
All you want to do is eat a little healthier. Really. Maybe get some of that Activa probiotic yogurt or something. So you look around and start researching what “healthier” means.
That really skinny old scientist dude says anything from an animal will give you cancer. But a super-ripped 60 year old with a best-selling diet book says eat more butter with your crispy T-Bone and you’ll be just fine as long as you stay away from grains. Great abs beat out the PhD so you end up hanging out on a forum where everyone eats green apples and red meat and talks about how functional and badass parkour is.
You learn that basically, if you ignore civilization and Mark Knopfler music, the last 10,000 years of human development has been one big societal and nutritional cock-up and wheat is entirely to blame. What we all need to do is eat like cave-people.
You’re hardcore now, so you go way past way cave-person. You go all the way to The Inuit Diet™.
Some people say it’s a little fringe, but you are committed to live a healthy lifestyle. “Okay,” you say, “let’s do this shit,” as you fry your caribou steak and seal liver in rendered whale blubber. You lose some weight which is good, but it costs $147.99 a pound for frozen seal liver out of the back of an unmarked van at the Canadian border.
Even though The Inuit Diet™ is high in Vitamin D, you learn that every disease anywhere can be traced to a lack of Vitamin D (you read that on a blog post) so you start to supplement. 5000 IU of Vitamin D before sitting in the tanning booth for an hour does wonders for your hair luster.
Maxing out your credit line on seal liver forces you to continue your internet education in healthy eating. As you read more you begin to understand that grains are fine but before you eat them you must prepare them in the traditional way: by long soaking in the light of a new moon with a mix of mineral water and the strained lacto-fermented tears of a virgin.
You discover that if the women in your family haven’t been eating a lot of mussels for at least the last four generations, you are pretty much guaranteed a $6000 orthodontia bill for your snaggle-tooth kid. That’s if you are able to conceive at all, which you probably won’t, because you ate margarine at least twice when you were 17.
Healthy eating is getting pretty complicated and conflicted at this point but at least everyone agrees you should eat a lot of raw vegetables.
Soon you learn that even vegetables are trying to kill you. Many are completely out unless they are pre-fermented with live cultures in a specialized $79 imported pickling crock. Legumes and nightshades absolutely cause problems. Even fermentation can’t make those healthy.
Goodbye, tomatoes. Goodbye green beans. Goodbye all that makes summer food good. Hey, it’s hard but you have to eliminate these toxins and anti-nutrients. You probably have a sensitivity. Actually, you almost positively have a sensitivity. Restaurants and friends who want to grab lunch with you will just have to deal.
Kale: it’s what’s for dinner. And lunch. And breakfast.
The only thing you are sure of is kale, until you learn that even when you buy organic, local kale from the store (organic, local kale is the only food you can eat now) it is probably GMO cross-contaminated. Besides, it usually comes rolled in corn starch and fried to make it crunchier. Market research, dahling…sorry, people like crunchy cornstarch breaded Kale-Crispers™ more than actual bunny food.
And by now you’ve learned that the only thing worse than wheat is corn. Everyone can agree on that, too. Corn is making all of America fat. The whole harvest is turned into ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, chicken feed and corn starch and the only people who benefit from all those corn subsidies are evil companies like Cargill.
Also, people around the world are starving because the U.S. grows too much corn. It doesn’t actually make that much sense when you say it like that, but you read it on a blog. And anyway, everyone does agree that corn is Satan’s grain. Unless wheat is.
The only thing to do, really, when you think about it, is to grow all your own food. That’s the only way to get kale that isn’t cornstarch dipped. You’ve read a lot and it is obvious that you can’t trust anything, and you can’t trust anyone and everything is going to kill you and the only possible solution is to have complete and total control over your foodchain from seed to sandwich.
Not that you actually eat sandwiches.
You have a little panic attack at the idea of a sandwich on commercial bread: GMO wheat, HFCS and chemical additive dough conditioners. Some people see Jesus in their toast but you know the only faces in that mix of frankenfood grains and commercial preservatives are Insulin Sensitivity Man and his sidekick, Hormonal Disruption Boy.
It’s okay, though. You don’t need a deli sandwich or a po’boy. You have a saute of Russian Kale and Tuscan Kale and Scotch Kale (because you love international foods). It’s delicious. No, really. You cooked the kale in a half-pound of butter that had more raw culture than a black-tie soiree at Le Bernardin.
You round out your meal with a little piece of rabbit that you raised up and butchered out in the backyard. It’s dusted with all-natural pink Hawaiian high-mineral sea salt that you cashed-in your kid’s college fund to buy and topped with homemade lacto-fermented herb mayonnaise made with coconut oil and lemons from a tropical produce CSA share that helps disadvantaged youth earn money by gleaning urban citrus. The lemons were a bit over-ripe when they arrived to you, but since they were transported by mountain bike from LA to Seattle in order to keep them carbon neutral you can hardly complain.
The rabbit is ok. Maybe a bit bland. Right now you will eat meat, but only meat that you personally raise because you saw that PETA thing about industrial beef production and you can’t support that. Besides, those cows eat corn. Which is obscene because cows are supposed to eat grass. Ironically, everyone knows that a lawn is a complete waste in a neighborhood – that’s where urban gardens should go. In other words, the only good grass is grass that cows are eating. You wonder if your HOA will let you graze a cow in the common area.
In the meantime, you are looking for a farmer who raises beef in a way you can support and you have so far visited 14 ranches in the tri-state area. You have burned 476 gallons of gas driving your 17-mpg SUV around to interview farmers but, sadly, have yet to find a ranch where the cattle feed exclusively on organic homegrown kale.
Until you do, you allow yourself a small piece of rabbit once a month. You need to stretch your supply of ethical meat after that terrible incident with the mother rabbit who nursed her kibble and ate her kits. After that, deep down, you aren’t really sure you have the stomach for a lot more backyard meat-rabbit raising.
So you eat a lot of homegrown kale for awhile. Your seasoning is mostly self-satisfaction and your drink is mostly fear of all the other food lurking everywhere that is trying to kill you.
Eventually your doctor tells you that the incredible pain you’ve been experiencing is kidney stones caused by the high oxalic acid in the kale. You are instructed to cut out all dark leafy greens from your diet, including kale, beet greens, spinach, and swiss chard and eat a ton of low-fat dairy.
Your doctor recommends that new healthy yogurt with the probiotics. She thinks it’s called Activa.
Bwahahaha. Loved this! Am linking to this today (and sending a copy to my husband…he has been rolling his eyes over my healthy eating ever since I got started) 🙂
Thank you. This made my day!
That was the best thing I’ve read all month. My abs hurt.
Definitely true. Everyone has to find a diet that works for them, taking both “scientific” and “anecdotal” evidence with a grain of salt. Go with what gets you great results.
I love this article! This is so me!
I didn’t read through all of the comments, but there was no mention in the article about now having to avoid bottled water and only drinking spring water that you go and collect yourself and has a ph of between 7-8. 🙂 With everything else we have to self prepare no problem adding yet another to the list.
Thanks for writing the article. We do have a lot in common.
Best. Post. Ever.
lol!!!
this was hysterical! thank you for making me laugh!
That was awesome! Thank you for the humorous spin on healthy eating.
Amazing… this is my life story plus I don’t like kale..and it left me with nothing to eat..
LOLOLOL! I loved reading this and it’s comically spot on for me.
This is great! I have often felt this way. I think I am doing the right thing with my diet and then I read one more article!!! Thanks for making me laugh!
How delightful! Perfect ending too.
Hehe. I can’t think how many times I’ve read conflicting nutrition information and just laughed. What’s the point!
Thank you, that was wonderful. As an over thinker and over researcher I very much appreciate the commentary on ‘the plight’ of the educated eater.
HILARIOUS! XD
Gotta be able to laugh at ourselves, eh? Loved it! Great post.
Add nutritional yeast for cheese, wth?, Sea vegetables that I can’t pronounce but Ariel can – that skinny bitch- no wonder she’s skinny she eats sea vegetables, and spirulina (what’s with the ocean? Maybe we are supposed to live in the ocean. Come to think of it I think I saw a blogpost about that. Know a good realtor?) to your soy and raw milk list for part 2 😀
OMG and kombucha! I never even had the store bought stuff let alone HEARD of it before but my healthy friends started talking about it on FB so I took a slimy mass of grossness from a friend and started brewing it myself. Uh yea, this post sums things up perfectly!
I’d stay away from kombucha. It is easily contaminated with poisonous mold and mildew.
read this article:
http://fungi.com/blog/items/kombucha-my-adventures-with-the-blob.html
Soooo funny!! You put what goes on in my head into words lol!
Why is figuring out what we can eat and serve our family so hard!? This should not be right!? lol
Your article is awesome! So funny. My husband and I have been somewhat obsessed about different types of diets for the past year or so. Nothing is healthy if you are super paranoid. Someone had to write about it and I’m glad you were one of them. Lol. Thanks for the post 🙂
Here’s hoping you’re the next Denise Minger. This is absolutely the most brilliant thing I’ve read in, well…ever.
You totally nailed this one!…thanks…
No wonder i always feel so much guilt while eating an In-N-Out burger; these must be the thoughts that race through my subconscious with every animalized bite.
Another approach to health:
https://burbdwelling.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/preface-fitness-month/
Such a great post. I work with individuals struggling with food problems and this post is great for grounding us all in reality and humor. Thank you. I look forward to sharing this with my clients and colleagues.
You had me at Monsanto patty. My DH and I just watched that doc along with the frankensteer and the Food Inc one the other day. And he thinks I’m nuts cause I just informed him that all our plastic containers are giving us cancer…. So that’s why I got new glass stuff! Lol I make our own bread now too! And I have considered sneaking some chickens and a goat into our HOA suburban backyard! You do know me! I’m showing this to everyone I know!
Wonderful piece of writing, thank you – LMAO!
Hilarious!!
here is to all my friends that always refer to me “eating so healthy”…. I often don’t eat anything but chocolate all day and then tell my kids they have to first eat something HEALTHY before they can have a biscuit. What is that … I guess we all have to decide for ourselves and we are responsible to guide our children with what we know. Find your own truth about what you put into your body.
I’ve totally done that.
Thank you for teaching me with laughter!! The best way to learn and remember what I learned!!
Keep it up!
Hilarious post! I got sick earlier this year (cancer scare, IBS, abdominal/intestinal pain, joint pain, anxiety/depression, insomnia, breast lumps, etc) and basically have gone through ALL of these stages in my eating and in assessing which diet I wanted to go with to heal my body….so it’s nice to laugh about it now. 😉 Definitely was not funny at the time! It made me realize my health has been affected by food toxins so I’ve done sooo much research and have landed on what’s best for me, but worth sharing with others in case it can help someone else on here: http://www.healingnaturallybybee.com/
Let me save you a little trouble. We did Bee’s diet (before she changed it to her NEW diet) for 2 years 5 or so years ago. I pretty much had constant diarrhea from drinking her raw “egg drink” twice per day. She’s taking all joy out of eating, for Pete’s sake! I’ve just finished 7 months of strict GAPS with no cheats, and can tell huge differences in many ways I won’t go into. I was just diagnosed as a Celiac-sufferer for the first time, and I’m almost 46. So now, we’re going to stick to GAPS mostly, with some other stuff thrown in once-in-a-while. GAPS has made me be able to eat almost anything healthy and it all now tastes delicious. Bee is a quack…. you’ll find quite a lot of my writing there if you go back far enough. She even has me on the testimonial page of her Yahoo Group! 🙂 Bee’s diet did help somewhat… but you don’t need to go to that extreme. All the best…. by the way, this article is hilarious! I’ve been doing the mean green juice every morning from Fat,Sick&NearlyDead, and I was wondering why the kale from the store felt powdery. Who knew I was on GAPS and was consuming corn starch… along with all the pesticides that probably didn’t come off by soaking in Veggie Wash! 😀 So for now, I’ll be gluten/sugar free. Who knows what I’ll be eating next year at this time on my quest to feel 20 again? 😀
this is hysterical! and it mirrors exactly what I’ve been going through! the thing about the seal liver was too much–I was laughing out loud…I stare into my refrigerater eliminating foods to eat for breakfast–too much sugar-tick. not enough protein- tick. should eat more greens with my egg but I don’t have any that go with egg-tick…and then I pull out the nuts I got at TJ’s–are they really what they say they are?
Thanks for this post!
This post made me laugh and cry! I have the hardest time sharing my findings with the people I love, they, of course, think I am nuts. I have learned that the journey to healthy eating is so personal, everyone is an expert, I have given up trying to convince others of my logic (except my kids). So, I now turn to those crazy people who are like me and talk to them instead, makes it a little easier, but I so badly want to convince those I love, parents, husband, bothers, that I am not crazy, or at least that I am not alone!
Lisa, you said that beautifully. healthy eating IS personal. it took so long to find what is right for me and I still keep modifying. Thankfully my husband is on board (most of the time) but I suspect some of my family and friends think I’ve lost my mind when I tell them some of the things I eat (and DON’T eat!). But we’re all in good company here!
Great post!
Hilarious!!! Its’s exactly like that… I felt so identified with your post. THANKS and GOOD LUCK!!!
This is awesome!
You clearly have a gift for writing and I like much of what I see on your site. That said, this piece actually makes me a little bit angry. I agree that eating well these days can be tricky to navigate and the wealth of information out there can be more confusing than helpful. As a Nutritionist, I work with people on a daily basis to make the best choices both for their bodies and in consideration of the bigger picture of our environment. Many of the things you somewhat mock in this article have actually been of great benefit to my clients and you fail to discuss how to use them in a balanced way. In my ten years of practice I have literally seen people completely change their lives and sense of well-being simply by shifting what they ate — and in some cases this means the inclusion of cultured vegetables.
At the end of the day we still don’t know the long term effects of GMO crops and pesticides. We are a sick and medicated society who needs to make changes in how we view our food system, as well as our bodies. You make some great points about the extreme lengths some people go to in order to achieve this, but you’re missing out on the many who select a balanced and thoughtful way of life.
Thanks for your thoughtful critique. I agree with you on fermented veggies, GMOs, and all that. I’m able to write this piece because I have swirled around in all these things. The reason this article doesn’t talk about living a balanced and thoughtful life with regards to food is because balanced and thoughtful isn’t very funny, and this is a humor piece. If this piece weren’t funny, you – and all these people who have commented about feeling trapped in the rabbit hole of conflicting advice about healthy eating – wouldn’t have read it. 🙂 I spend a lot of time on my blog talking about avoiding chemicals, lacto-fermentation, growing your own food, cooking from scratch, etc. But this post was just for fun, just for all of us out there who feel like we will never get it right because “healthy” is a moving target and everyone has their pet “perfect diet”. So when your patients come to you, wide-eyed and food-fearful and start shaking your shoulders saying, “JUST TELL ME WHAT I CAN EAT ALREADY!” you can think back on this article and chuckle because you’ll have a good idea of what they’ve been going through trying to figure it out on their own. 🙂
Erica,
Loved your bit! Love the comments! Laughed and laughed. I appreciate all the terrible medical things people have gone through, everything they have tried, celebrating what works and not giving up trying to find solutions/diagnoses.
For a variety of reasons, I went 90% vegan three years ago. ( The 10% missing is usually when I visit my great kids–none of us will be convincing each other ) I wanted to share w/folks a mantra which is VERY helpful for me in keeping my vegan life pleasant and rewarding:
“This is a choice, not a sentence.”
Here’s to everybody living their best life (and I thank God there’s no cholesterol in wine)!
I love your mantra.
JJ76, my thoughts run in the same vein as yours, but with a great deal of concern: homo sapiens is on the brink of mass extinction, and poor nutrition ia one of the causative factors. We are emulating the history of Rome, and we, too, will fall if we don’t take remedial action. Also, Monsanto and the other big chemical aggregates spend billions of dollars on propaganda that does exactly what this article does; belittle, poke fun at, denigrate, but does not give the “how to” for people to improve their nutrition. Funny? Well written? Yes, by all means, but on the other hand, Nero fiddled and laughed while Rome burned. Humor can be deadly.
Poor nutrition is of huge concern to the millions who live on low calorie diets in 3rd world countries. Folks in India regularly live on 500 calories a day or less and with serious vitamin deficiencies, especially A and B. In 2005, 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women, in 122 countries, were affected by VAD. Golden Rice (read up on it — it produces significant amounts of beta carotene in the endosperm) would be a big help in improving their lives, but it’s a GMO, so that’s verboten — serious people like you wouldn’t allow it. That’s what’s not funny. And it’s not scientific.
I agree that the point may be to bring a laugh and relax a little, but those of us who see up close the tragedy of autism, autoimmunity and mental illness might not see the joke. We just buried a friend, a younger father, who committed suicide after years of depression, pain and suffering. He had many symptoms of serious food intolerances. Very likely these very attitudes in others influenced his reluctance to treat them. Laughing at other’s calamity is not necessarily a safe path for oneself.
Funniest thing I’ve read all week. Thank you.
And you know that Kale is really high in sodium, right? So there goes your blood pressure. And you also know that rabbit is almost entirely devoid of any nutritional value? People have literally starved to death eating rabbit in the wild.
Oh my Gosh!! I love this post! I, too, was making myself crazy with all this stuff! When I had read a while back about the oxalic acid thing with kale, I was like….come onnnnnnn…..really? *hands thrown up in the air*
I make my own water and dairy kefir (from raw milk, of course), my own seed and legume sprouts, beet kvass and raw sauerkraut, soak my nuts (gave up almonds because of the jet-fuel-derived sprays), occasionally eat grass fed meat and pastured eggs (from local farm co-op), I’m veggie juicing……
……..Yes, I’m giving myself permission to not be perfect all the time! All of this diet choice bashing is making me crazy too. Paleo vs. Weston Price, vegan vs. vegetarian…..blah, blah, blah!
Thanks for the comic relief!
The butter that you fried your kale in … was that from your own kale fed cow? O_o
Bahahahaha. You are AMAZING. That’s hilarious, and nearly the story of my life, lol. Well done.
Soy is awesome for my cramps. One glass of chocolate soy milk is as good as a full dose of ibuprofen for me.
This was a hilarious post, and I think also an important one. It highlights how expensive “healthy” eating is. That is how it always has been and likely always will be. The poor are less healthy than the rich — it must be what they eat! It can’t possibly be because they don’t get enough to eat, or enough variety in what they eat, or because of stress or poor healthcare. And health just has to be something we can control, right? If it applies to tobacco it must apply to food too! Even though human beings are omnivores with amazing digestions and the ability to draw nutrients from just about anything living, and who have historically eaten whatever they could get. You want a real paleo diet, you should be eating lots of insects.
And it won’t be ordinary insects. It will be organic free range heirloom insects which are very different from the sort of insects you could just find for your self. They’ll probably need to be recreated from the DNA of insects preserved in amber, but this won’t count as GMO.
I find it truly amazing that your sarcastic tone and hyperbolic statements continue throughout the ENTIRE article!!! You are a GREAT writer!
I strive to emulate your work!
Oh god, I was literally laughing out loud at this. Brilliant post!
This is an amazing post! Truly hilarious but sadly too true.
This is just hilarious. I’ve been going to see an MD who specializes in acupuncture and Chinese medicine for the last year or so to help with some digestive problems I was having. While the acupuncture has helped me immensely, she’s been after me to go paleo and start eating meat again – after 22 years as a vegetarian! (I do eat dairy and eggs, and we are lucky enough that we have our own chickens who give us dozens of their lovely eggs every morning!)
Unless you have severe food allergies (and I don’t), I just don’t get the whole gluten-legume-grain-dairy free thing. Seriously? I just happen to think that a healthy diet is MORE inclusive, not less. Even though I’m veg, I’ve been known to have a helping of freshly-caught pike during ice fishing season…
If you want a good explanation for why it can be beneficial to cut out starchy grains and veggies for a while to heal your intestinal issues, read the book Gut and Psychology Syndrome, by NAtasha Campbell-McBride. She does a very thorough job explaining the whole rationale.
This was such a great read!! Thank you!!!