My Food Revolution: Dealing with the Pushback

There have been a lot of benefits to learning about how food is made, where my food comes from, and even how to eat better. I feel better, I look better, and I know what I'm doing is better for me and the environment. It's been a constant struggle to encounter people who not only treat me like I'm crazy but also the ones who treat me like I'm manipulated and stupid for changing my ways. Even though I'm the one who has been reading the books, watching the documentaries, I'm the one who knows the least. And once that's known, it then becomes about how all of those books and documentaries are slanted and pure propaganda. I think there is a very big piece of the puzzle missing from most of the conversations where I experience 'push back' - it's called common sense. Let's throw out what the experts have found and just take a look at growing trends and try to see what could attribute to it.

Resistance to Antibiotics
There's this saying, 'You are what you eat' but as Michael Pollan brought up in his book In Defense of Food, 'You are what you eat eats.' This saying had me thinking about more than food, about antibiotics. For years Doctors had warned against using too many antibiotics for fear of resistance to antibiotics in the future. There was a time when Doctors wrote a prescription for every ailment, that time has come and gone and now we are seeing a stricter grip on recommending antibiotics. It stands to reason that resistance to antibiotics is bad, that these superviruses and superbacteria are evolving to survive antibiotics, and this is a problem for the health care industry and for us. Would it not make sense to also cut back on eating food that has been fed antibiotics as well? If our food is fed antibiotics to deal with the living conditions it's a fair assumption to make that there are superviruses and superbacteria that are evolving that target chicken and cows as well. By giving so many antibiotics instead of relying on the evolutionary process and the defenses their bodies have could be weakened, causing the need for more antibiotics. If we're so concerned with the amount of antibiotics we put in our own bodies, we should be equally as concerned about the amount of antibiotics we put in our food.

Natural Woman?
These days girls are menstruating at a younger and younger age. What used to start at age 16 is now beginning at age 9. What is the change in this, how can this be changing virtually over night? One could make the argument that the hormones (rBGH) used to increase milk production could be affecting as well. While it might seem unnatural to do so, let's take a look at things from a common sense perspective. Before the 1960s there was no to limited manipulation by food companies with their products. The average age for a girl developing was in the range from 13-18. After the 1960s we started changing our food, processing it, adding hormone, antibiotics, etc. In this day and age there are cases of pre-teens having babies and children as young as 9 starting their menstruation cycle. We are literally speeding up the process of aging, and given how many women wish to have children in their late thirties after they pursue a career starting their period at nine will make it that much harder. Evolution doesn't change things over night, these children should not be getting their period or having the ability to make a baby at such a young age, yet they do. This change is caused by something and my money is on hormones in our food.

Case Study: Margarine
Back in the day when margarine came out my Grandpa Pop said hell to the no was that going in his stomach. It didn't taste right to him and he refused to let my Grandma serve it. Now we know that the thing most food marketing tells us is deadly and bad for us is Trans Fat. Back in the day margarine had the deadly Trans Fat. I have a theory on man-made vs. made by nature/God and it basically is this: man is limited by what [s]he knows and often we find [s]he doesn't know enough. Just like with margarine which was introduced to take the place of butter as something much healthier for us, Heroine was developed by researchers as a safe alternative to Morphine. Patients had become addicted to Morphine and these doctors and researchers developed Heroine as a way to help them out as they believed Heroine was not addictive. It was later found out that Heroine was exponentially more addictive than Morphine. I am not saying science does nothing right, in fact Novocaine is an altered form of Cocaine that does not cross the blood-brain barrier thus it is not addictive and can be used as a local anesthetic so scientists have gotten some things right and some things wrong. What I am saying is until we know what is truly in this scientific food it might be best to leave it be.

Think before you eat something that has ingredients you cannot pronounce. Think before you eat meat that isn't free range, grass fed. Think before you purchase groceries, think before you go out to a restaurant. Even if you don't go as far as I am going in my quest for health just take a moment and think about what you are putting in your body. If you have more questions than answers about the food you are eating, chances are it's not something you want to put into your mouth.