As long as I can remember, I thought cutting calories was
the best way to lose weight and ‘get into good shape.’ Granted I learned this
as a child, so we are talking about the 70s; learning healthy lifestyle tips
from a jaded P.E. teacher whose gym shorts were from another generation— his.
Mr. Y probably should’ve retired a decade or two before… Anyway, I honestly
thought that people must be swimming laps at night in order to exercise enough
to burn all the calories they ate in a day. And as soon as I realized that
wasn’t happening for me, I switched tactics; I’m a member of the Lost Protein
Generation. Somehow, in high school, my body survived on diet Dr Pepper,
individually wrapped slices of American cheese, and corn nuts. No wonder I
couldn’t climb the rope.
When I was a girl it was all sugar and spice and everything
nice, but nowadays sugar is killing little girls. Today we have obese
six-month-olds. Yep, you read that right: obese at six months old. What the
what?! How is that even possible, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s in the
fucking formula. It’s in everything: bbq sauce, bread, catsup, honey mustard, milk,
the list goes on and on. There is even research showing that how much sugar a
woman consumes while she’s pregnant can affect her unborn child’s health.
Fructose is poisonous to human bodies, just like alcohol and tobacco, and it is
transferred in utero as well.
Not to mention the preservatives; the chemicals that found
their way into our food in the 70s and stayed, like couch-surfing free-loading
friends. Forty years later, you’d think we might’ve made some progress with
regards to nutrition, but you’d be wrong. Just a few weeks ago Subway said they
would stop using azodiacarbonamide to make their bread. (Azodiacarbonamide is a
chemical used in the production of yoga mats.) Stories like this one and the
‘pink slime’ that passes for USDA approved beef beg the question: What are the
good people at the FDA doing all day?
I feel like a hamster who’s been thrown into the deep end of
an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Hopeless. The corporations have bulldozed
nutrition in their eternal quest for products with the highest possible profit
margin. Planning, shopping and preparing only organic, homemade meals for a
family is a full-time job, only now we are a two-sometimes-three-income per household
nation. And the bureaucrats whose job it is to protect us from poison in our
food sold us out a long time ago for a coke and a smile.
“The Coke Conspiracy” as referenced in Sugar: The Bitter
Truth* explains why the FDA can’t ban chronic disease causing agents from our
food due to the fact that the US only exports three things people want these
days: weapons, entertainment, and fast food. Robert Lustig, MD presents a
terrifyingly convincing argument that “fructose is the cause of the metabolic
syndrome: obesity, type II diabetes, lipid problems, hyper-tension and cardiovascular
disease.” And I believe the inflammation caused by all the sugar, coupled with
the genetic modification of our crops is why we have cancer centers as crowded
as O’Hare on a holiday.
Now, I’m not saying people like Earl “Rusty” Butz (not
joking, that’s his name) should take all the blame for sick kids today, but he
can have a second helping. If we’re talking about the separation of selling and
regulating our food, ole Rusty Butz seems to have not only let the business into
agriculture, he set them up with a nice clean stall and a full trough.
Until a healthy body is as much of a priority as a healthy
bottom line, I guess we’ll all just have to keep swimming through the crap
they’re processing, packaging and selling as food. We’ll have to read through the
unpronounceable ingredients and avoid them, sticking to real, whole foods whenever
possible. Since the FDA won’t protect us from GMOs and chemical food, we’ll have
to be extra vigilant with what we put in our mouths. We’ll be our own
lifeguards— both in and out of the pool.
