Dec 08 2008
Addicted to Cheese
I love how there is so much food out there that tastes so good and on any given day, the medical community can’t even come up with a consensus as to whether it’s good for us or not. Eggs are versatile, delicious, and depending on the mood of the practitioner, one of the best foods you can consume or a heart attack waiting to happen. Cheese is ridiculously high in fat, but has nutritional value of some kind in the dairy family. Is butter or margarine better for you? Shortening: there is something very unnatural about vegetable oil that is solid at room temperature, if you can call shortening solid.
I’m inclined to follow the advice of physicians who are smart enough to realize that the more doctors learn, the less they really seem to know or understand. I largely try to satisfy my body’s cravings, since experience has taught me that they have something to do with nutrition that I am lacking, and I avoid processed sugars and pre-packaged snacks and I seem to do ok. My religion also teaches that red meat should be eaten sparingly if at all, so I avoid it. It also makes my groceries much less expensive. My kids get to snack on produce, get protein, carbs and dairy during meals and basically everything else is a treat. I’ve discovered that my life is easier that way, and neither of my kids is a happy meal away from childhood obesity or losing their vision to diabetes.
A somewhat related problem is a generation ago, science tried to convince women that they should bottle-feed their infants instead of breastfeeding them because bottle-feeding was more scientific. A generation since, we’re discovering that breastfeeding not only gets exactly the nutrients the infants need to the infant, but it also decreases the risk of essentially all women’s cancers and osteoporosis for the mothers. So an entire generation of grandmothers and great grandmothers got short-changed on their health and a generation of mothers and grandmothers have increased risk of asthma, allergies and decreased immune function because doctors thought they knew better than midwives have been suggesting for centuries.
Using science exclusively to figure out dietary needs is an exercise in lunacy. Why is it so critical that we have to make these mistakes and cost people the quality of their lives as a price to know why? Experiments on a population should at the very least have their consent and allow people to volunteer.
Now, I shall get down off my soapbox and return to my sedentary lifestyle in front of the computer, thereby helping me attain my goal of heart failure by the age of 35. I guess I’m going to have to face it: I’m addicted to cheese.
