Deadly Food

 

At a breakfast buffet on Sunday morning, a seventy-nine year old relative told me he fell as he got out of the shower. No bones were broken, and he stated that he thought the reason he fell was because he was carrying too much fat around his belly. A second later when someone mentioned that the food we were eating wasn’t helping anyone’s health, he shrugged it off, saying that at his age weight didn’t matter.

Because my family was together this weekend to celebrate Mom’s eighty-first birthday, I had lots of extra food on hand. I made sure there was a lot of fruit and vegetables in addition to the ham, snacks and birthday cake, but of course even eating too much nutritious food is unhealthy. As we all ate more than was good for us, I couldn’t help but bring up the topic of obesity again and again. I was obsessed with it, and everyone else agreed- food is causing serious health problems in all age groups.

I often get an e-mail from Real Age diet website. It didn’t take long for me to notice that although the site emphasized healthy food, most of the articles began with ‘eat this.’ Eat broccoli for anti-oxidants, eat carrots for beta-carotin, eat fiber to curb your appetite, eat eat eat eat eat eat eat. Exactly like the women’s magazines that offer advice on weight loss wrapped around recipes. Advice on health begins with ‘Eat.’

I don’t know why we are so afraid of being hungry when the chances of any American missing a meal are slim. Most people, like me, haven’t felt a hunger pang in years, so why do we let food consume us? We are like misers who can’t get enough gold even though we have more than we can spend. We get more vitamins, minerals, and nutrients than our bodies can handle, but we're always on the look-out for more to eat.

I think our greedy eating habits are killing us.

Nancy Sherer

 

 


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