Eat Yourself Healthy

I’ve recently been getting into the concept of “healthy eating.” You might find that hard to believe, considering you can tell I’m obviously struggling to type this out over all the keyboard crumbs, but it’s true—I’ve made the incredible (and, I might add, completely depressing) discovery that how my body feels is directly correlated to what substances I put into it.

I realize most of you, astute readers, already made this discovery somewhere around age 3-and-a-half, when grandma let you eat that entire tub of ice cream to get back at your mother for making her watch you again. As such, you might find it suspect that I have decided to proclaim my oddly-newfound knowledge at such a time when food quality is in the center of the news cycle. 

You might find it a tad suspicious that in the age of RFK Jr., “Make America Healthy Again (or “mm A-HA!” for short), and political action against Big Pharma I would stoop so low as to discuss my (again, obviously disgusting) eating habits. “Perhaps SOMEone,” you say (I’m writing this in a comically snobbish accent in case you can’t tell), “is trying to curry favour” (see how I spelled it the snobby British way) “with the ruling class, hmm?” 

You would be exactly correct, only this time my sycophancy is actually justified. At first, like anyone, I only cheered on the mm A-HA! movement on the assumption they would undo Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch crusade and put 16 oz. porterhouses back in our kids’ cafeterias. But then, in between bites, I started looking into the research. And I started seeing a worrying pattern. 

There’s a kind of repeating news story about our food science. Some low-level nutjob will raise concerns about a random, popular, low-cost food additive, say Carbon bi-sulforicphosphorate, used as a food dye in some of the nation’s most beloved brands. Some say the highly-addictive chemical could cause gastrointestinal blockage, skin lesions, and sporadic baldness. The major food companies assure everyone their products are safe, and any trace amounts of CBSP that didn’t burn off in the cooking process were sure to be suitable for consumption. Nevertheless, it sparks a vigorous debate in which the public pushes for answers, pressuring the FDA to commission the first ever study on the effects of CBSP in mammals, which concludes that CBSP only causes cancer. 

The major food companies still insist more research is needed, and they successfully lobby for their own researchers to conduct a 10-year meta-study, during which time CBSP would continue to be legal without requiring disclosure on the product labels. This continues until some 4-year-old dies from consuming 36 boxes of “Whacky-Zany-Multicolored Gloober Sugar Bars,” and a torrent of lawsuits against manufacturers using CBSP put increasing pressure on the market. This, in turn, finally generates enough stalled kickbacks for the FDA to ban CBSP altogether, when another early study shows that it causes cancer and baldness. All products containing CBSP are promised to be pulled from the shelves, and the major food companies just switch to anthrax.

Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my carcinogens in my building supplies, electronics, automobiles, and beauty products—not in my children’s food (though we still regularly purchase “Whacky-Zany-Multicolored Gloober Sugar Bars” since our son won’t nap without them). And yet, you’ll find that nearly every product in the grocery store has a laundry list of industrial cleaning chemicals in their ingredients, once you start looking for them. Common cereals like Cheerios contain “trisodium phosphate,” a strong cleaning agent. Skittles have “titanium dioxide,” a chemical banned in Europe. Even my preferred saltine brand contains alarmingly-high concentrations of “carbohydrates”!

The most prosperous nation on Earth can do better. It’s time we clean up our grocery shelves. I want to start seeing packages that say “Veggie Straws: Made with real Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil!” And I want to see them in my section of the grocery store instead of just in the fancy organic aisle.

So, I have great hope for the mm A-HA! movement. This “healthy eating” is, cómo se dice, challenging on my own. Deceptive marketing and poor manufacturing make it hard enough to even find the snacks with real hydrogenated vegetable oil, let alone the money and self-control needed to follow through with the purchase. We are getting slowly poisoned by that which should nourish us, and in a manner even more malicious than grandma’s ice cream. It’s becoming patently obvious to everyone, and not just our wise, intelligent, and shall I add incredibly-handsome political leaders, that some major government action is needed for the sake of the common good. 

Obviously, it won’t be easy. I believe we’re on the cusp of such a tidal shift. Any day, I expect the metaphorical tar-and-feathering of all artificial food additives—and hopefully whoever is running Nestlé nowadays. In the meantime, I’ve been doing my patriotic duty to buy up all the “Whacky-Zany-Multicolored Gloober Sugar Bars” I can find so that no other families might unwittingly consume them. This, of course, has made my individual task of healthy eating that much harder—and hence the keyboard crumbs. But we’re all going to need to make sacrifices for the future of our children and our children’s health. I suggest you start soon; perhaps by packing your kid’s porterhouse lunch this week for a change.