Men lie. Women lie. Numbers don’t.
The USA spends more on healthcare than any other country (per person) and gets the least for it. I think there would be half as many issues if we knew how to eat better. The problem is, there’s a ton of misinformation out there. Or someone is trying to SELL you the info…for profit.
The other night, I got hungry and thought: Toast with nut butter and honey. Mmmmm.
As I stood over the sink, munching my (gluten free) Ezekiel spelt “bread” slathered with organic almond butter, raw local honey and washing it down with a half glass of tea, I suddenly realized…
I’d become one of ‘Them’!
You know. The ‘Weird People’ who ate ‘Weird Foods’.
Ick! I’d always tried to avoid that. Growing up, I was friends with a girl named Aura. Her mom was a midwife and they were moneyed hippies. Their house ran on solar panels. They had hard wood floors instead of rugs. They took supplements. And I’m not entirely sure her mom shaved her legs. They ate things like…organic almond butter, Ezekiel toast and almond milk. We made fun of them.
What the hell had happened?
When I visited my Mom’s recently, my brother threw a fit because I’d needed to go to make a special grocery store trip to pick up my own things. He made fun of my ‘Weird Food’ needs.
But he himself looked like shit. Bloated and overweight with thinning hair and adult acne. He was also on several different blood pressure medicines, had a red face and looks much older than I do, despite being four years younger. I don’t suppose it ever resonates with enough people that “We are what we eat.”
The Hippocratic Oath declares: “Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food.” Yet most doctors loathe to address their patients diets. In fact, most doctors have little or no nutritional training. Before these recent designer drugs, all we had was food and herbs. Cola syrup or ginger calmed nausea. Aloe for cuts and burns. Honey for cuts and dry skin. Hydration and caffeine for headaches. Rice for diarrhea. Yogurt for constipation. Tea trea oil for breakouts. Hot peppers for arthritis. These things still work.
I don’t believe there isn’t much that can’t be eased or even cured by the correct diet.
Back in the day, food used to be food. It was simple. Chicken, eggs, green beans, apples, honey, peanuts, steak, bacon, oatmeal… If you were having apple cake or soup, your mom had to make it. Or you (and your father) starved. I blame the lack of easy food for all three of my father’s rushed marriages. He only had two weeks between relationships before the weight loss really started to show and all the fried eggs and bacon he was eating every meal got old fast. It was time to find a cook…erm…wife.
Now, the WEIRD ‘franken-food’ IS packaged food. Everything comes to us processed with added sugars, preservatives, coloring, and fillers. There’s a list 5-lines deep of ingredients on a roasted chicken. Most of it we can’t pronounce let alone have a clue what it actually IS.
The majority of what we eat in America has been altered. It’s called Genetically Modified Organism, or GMO. It’s not long term tested on humans, so we are essentially lab rats. The actual lab rats being fed GMO’s have developed huge, bulging cancer tumors and organ damage.
Almost 100% of US corn and soy are genetically modified. Those are the two most important things to avoid. Which is hard,when they’re fed to our NON-organic/non-free range livestock as well. Choose carefully for you and yours.
To make matters even more complicated, GMO’s are owned by a nasty corporation called Monsanto. To give you just one small example, Monsanto created Agent Orange…the same stuff in the pesticide called RoundUp that’s being used on all of our food. Agent Orange killed and maimed millions during the Vietnam war and it’s responsible for a half million or more birth defects.
Monsanto is a direct financial contributor to most of the people in our government and have been for quite a while. They line pocket. Heavily. It’s no wonder so many healthy things have been banned or removed and corn syrup (GMO) has infiltrated all that we eat. Even bread, meats and cheese. (High Fructose Corn Syrup is a direct cause of Type 2 Diabetes. It spikes insulin much harder than sugar. When it’s in everything, eventually with enough spikes, your own ability to create insulin shuts down.)
To further put this into perspective; our food is so toxic it’s internationally banned in all other countries. Half our skin products are as well. We’d be smart to clean up our food and boost our economy with delicious “Made in the USA” product exports, but it seems we’d rather parasitically profit off our own getting sick.
Of course, this is all for another blog, but please google and research for yourself.
It’s no coincidence that we’re fatter and sicker than ever. If you follow the money, I’d be willing to bet my soul that the FDA is in bed with the For Profit Medical System we have here in the USA. Healthcare is our # 6 most profitable business in America. Coincidentally, prescription drugs are our #1 killer. Obesity and heart disease are # 2. How many doctors and drug co reps can buy oceanfront vacation homes on those kinds of profits? And when it comes to REAL health and weight lose, you can’t just pop a pill.
You have to see it as a lifestyle change. Not a diet.
This is called “Clean Eating”.
(That makes the alternative “Dirty”.)
We need the KISS theory for our food. Go back to SIMPLE in order to be healthier. Chicken, eggs, green beans, apples, honey, bananas, nuts, steak that actually comes from grassy pastures, etc. Food that doesn’t need to a label because what you see is what you get. Does it cost a little more? Sure. But if you weigh that against the cost of medical bills, lost wages and suffering, I think it’s pretty clear that you’re either going to spend a little more now, or spend a lot later.
If anyone can look at the photos of Agent Orange…the lab rats…those around them who have gotten cancer…diabetes…sick…Autism cases…crazy amount of food allergies…and still have excuses for not eating clean, then they are simply beyond help.
Too many people throw their hands up and mutter “genetics”. This is an abused word and cop-out that allows us to place our fat blame on something else. “Oh, it’s out of our control, it’s my genetics.” BULLSHIT. Genetics don’t play much of a role in your life as far as what you CAN look like. They can be ‘undone’ by diet and exercise.
Genetics determine if you have wide shoulders. Habits determine if you have a wide ass.
Just because your mom has a fat ass, your sister has a fat ass and your grandma had a fat ass does NOT mean that YOU should have a fat ass.
…If you don’t WANT to.
Fact: Your daily habits matter far more than genetics ever could. Take responsibility for yourself.
Eat ‘Weird Foods’.
Look better.
Feel better.
BE BETTER.
COPYRIGHT APRIL HUNTER. NO PART OF THIS BLOG MAY BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION.
Photos: Kelly O’Neil
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Putting The Clothes On, Taking The Gloves Off. 
I think your comment “If you follow the money, I’d be willing to bet my soul that the FDA is in bed with the For Profit Medical System we have here in the USA.” is more true than you realise. I’m pretty sure that the majority of top officials of the FDA are ex Monsanto executives, which explains why they make so many decisions that are actually detrimental to your health.
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You know…..I think there are two main issues when it comes to diet, and how we care for ourselves, and you touched on both a bit here. Number one…..everyone gets so up in arms about the cost of clean eating, about how expensive it can be to eat properly. To a certain extent that can be true, it can cost a bit more for the good stuff in comparison to what a majority of people normally eat.
HOWEVER, I think there is an important factor that tends to be overlooked when calculating that extra cost. That is that…..if you are planning to buy this stuff in ADDITION to what you are buying now…..then of course it’s going to cost you more, because you are not reallocating your funds to support your new way of eating. So now you’re not only trying to afford the junk you normally buy, but also shoehorn in this higher quality stuff, something has to give in that scenario. There simply isn’t gonna be enough money to go around to support both diets.
It comes down to priorities in the end, do you really want to make a change or not? What habit are you going to support? I really believe that healthy eating and a healthy lifestyle doesn’t have to be as expensive as some make it out to be or as unaffordable. The problem is, people want to have their cake and eat it too, and that’s just not going to work.
It’s a copout really, an excuse. When I get told that we can’t afford to buy certain things, what I hear is “we don’t want to change our current spending habits to accommodate that shift in diet”. If one truly cares about their health, they will do anything they can to try and better it, even if that means making sacrifices and changes from what they know and are used to. What we have in this country, is a populace who puts their convenience, their comfortability over that. So I really don’t think eating right is as hard as people say it is, it’s just they don’t wanna make the changes that would have to come with it.
In fact that leads me to my other point…..about how we view dieting. As you say we want the quick fix, we want to be able to pop a pill or drink a shake and lose weight. We don’t want to actually put the work in to make ourselves healthier. It’s not a geunine change. That’s why most people who go on diets I think fail and fall of them, because they went into it from the mindset of…..”how can I lose this weight” or “how can I make this problem go away” not from the mindset of “how can I become healthy and stay healthy”. They want again that quick fix without having to truly change anything.
The word diet itself implies negative. When someone goes on a diet, they generally do it cause they have to or feel they need to, not because they actually WANT to. How you approach it makes a world of difference I believe. In the first instance, you really don’t want to change, you feel deprived, you feel like you’re missing something, in the other…..it’s a conscious choice to change. You know you could eat one thing over another, but you are actively choosing of your own will not to do that. That perception, that mindset, is either what will keep you successful at what you want to achieve, or keep you constantly falling back to old habits. It all starts with you, change your motivations, change your approach, and you’ll change your life with it.
So yeah…..in conclusion here, I truly believe that when it comes to food and nutrition, how we care for ourselves…..perception is HUGE. Instead of looking for reasons why we CAN’T do it, or looking for things to take that only treat and not prevent, we need to turn that around. You cannot expect a different result if you keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, it is the definition of insanity. Yet that’s exactly what we are doing, we eat the same garbage day in and day out, make the same excuses as to why we can’t do anything different, and then we wonder why we’re so sick and drugged up all the time. We never look in the mirror.
If we want change it has to start with us, no one else is gonna do it. We have to stop relying on others to care for us, on pills and broken diets, and start to do it ourselves. It’s the only way to truly get healthy.
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Oh and something else also…..as far diet goes, the other big problem we have I think is that….we really don’t think about what we are doing when we go on one. We are more focused on low calorie, low salt, low fat and low sugar, than we are anything else. We don’t think about what is going into the calories we consume, or what we are replacing the unwanted sodium, fat and sugars with. There is no true work involved on our part, it’s again that quick fix type syndrome, “eat this and lose weight” “limit that and have a flat stomach”, etc etc etc without really considering just what is going into what we are consuming.
I mean….doesn’t anyone find it strange that in a culture that is more obsessed about diet, weight, and overall appearance than perhaps any previous one ever was, we are STILL one of the most sick and overweight? That shouldn’t be possible, and yet it is reality.
Our present view of what it means to diet just is not working. We have to get away from the idea that simply cutting calories, cutting salt, sugar or fat, is the answer to our prayers. It’s just not the case. To be truly healthy, we must have an acute awareness and understanding of every single thing we are putting in our bodies and what those things do to us, positively or negatively. We must EDUCATE ourselves. There’s no shortcut around that. Until we can learn collectively to start doing that, things are not going to change. We will continue to perish for our own lack of knowledge.
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I completely agree…with both of you. And if I’d gone into all of that, this blog would be far too long. I was trying to keep it as simple and light as possible…because no one has ever gotten rich overestimating the intelligence of Americans. 😉 But I can write about it in the future. One thing that drives me nuts is the war on meat and cholesterol. People buy into this shit that bacon and cheese is awful, but whole grain breads and baked chips are great. It’s a travesty. Same with sodium. I eat salt on EVERYTHING. I add it. People are fat, sick and restricted because of the choices they have made. We reap what we sow…and most don’t WANT to make a lifestyle change.
The same people who say they “can’t” will later complain about how fat they are, or how many meds they’re on. Or…that they’re dying.
-April
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Oh yeah there is so so much misinformation about what is good and what isn’t now, it’s ridiculous. You can add butter to the list as well, in addition to the others.
People have got to understand that the problems do NOT lie in the fats, the sugars, the salts at all. All of these things in their proper forms have some nutritional benefit to us. The body needs them, fat especially. They are not the problem here…..the SOURCES of them are. There is a HUGE difference between conventionally raised, grain fed meats, and their organic, grass fed counterparts. Dairy is much the same, one is not the same as the other at all.
Yet you never ever hear any of this brought up in the mainstream do you? No, all you ever hear is “red meat is bad and linked to cancer” or “use low fat cheese or skim milk in meals to cut calories and fat” and I won’t even get into the margarine vs. butter deal. Not even flies will touch margarine if it’s left open to them…..nuff said right there.
Once again, it’s all about education….it is up to us to keep informed instead of relying on everyone else to tell us what’s true or not, because left to the hands of others, all we’ll get is lies, lies and more lies.
And as an aside, your last note at the end really resonates with me. My mom refuses to take care of herself at all….she drinks heavily every single day (at least 3 or 4 beers a night, sometimes more), guzzles down gallon after gallon of diet soda on top of that (these are basically all she drinks, along with blue maui liquor which she’s been known to consume a whole bottle of in a single night at times), eats out constantly, mcdonald’s quite regularly when she does, very little vegetables (usually just frozen corn), no fruits, uses loads of salt, more than she really needs, etc etc. And then she’ll complain about her stomach hurting her or her bones, not being able to walk hardly at just over 50 years old (this part I think is directly related to the diet soda she drinks as the aspartame in it can’t go anywhere else but into them directly).
I constantly am trying to tell her that if she wants to feel better she needs to make changes, she can’t expect them if she keeps doing the same shit again and again. Yet day in and day out she keeps the same habits…..it is so hard to watch. It breaks my heart to see her doing that to herself, slowly killing herself little by little and not being able to stop it. It’s not a good feeling. 😦
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I know this feeling, I just spent 3 years watching my mom die from cancer…all brought on by her own lifestyle choices. She was VERY sorry she’d done that and flat out said she wished she’d listened to me. I took her to a natural homeopathic doctor who was trying to ease some of the chemotherapy issues, keep some weight on her and heal her…but it was too late. However, I learned even more on those visits…like B17 being banned for cancer therapy. I will never touch margarine. I eat a lot of fat, few carbs, try to limit the sugar…I find it stores in the belly area, but you’re right…it’s about WHERE the food comes from and HOW it’s grown & made.
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Yeah I could imagine that had to be excruciating for you….that type of powerless feeling. My condolences by the way, had seen you reference her here before. But yeah….that must have been tough, and from what you said about your brother here, I would sense the feeling there isn’t too far removed from what you dealt with before. Hopefully he’ll come around one day though, before he would suffer what your mom did.
My mom I think knows what she does is killing her, but is just really apathetic…..she is very depressive, has been for a long long time, talks about hating her job, hating her life, not wanting to wake up, that she’s dying, etc. I hate it, she just has this defeated mindset about her. Nothing anyone says will sink in, in her mind it’s just too late to do anything different. I have a hard time with it…..with the environment in general living here in fact with that type of negativity being so prevalent. It’s draining.
As far as the cancer thing….I get so disgusted by the whole culture when it comes to treatment. There are so so many things in nature that can cure it, whether it be B17 as you referenced or different foods and herbs, but because none of that is profitable against the cash cow that has been created, all of that information gets suppressed.
I mean do people really truly think that after DECADES of begging for money for research raking in billions of dollars now annually, that they can’t find a cure? Fact is they KNOW cures exist, they just don’t want us to know because if we do, all that money they get now goes away. It is entirely a greed driven deal, our health or well being never entered into their priorities here. It’s sad, and hard for a lot of people to accept, but it’s true nonetheless.
Have you heard about wheat belly on a different note having referenced the belly thing? I’ve often wondered if I have that at all, I’ve always had a bit of one even now after dropping 40 lbs the last few years, wonder if it’s related to my wheat intake. Could be sugar too though….I eat more of that than I should as well. I am actually gonna cut way back on sugar soon, maybe even entirely for a while to regulate my levels, might be interesting to see how my belly reacts to that……guess I’ll have to see.
But anyway wondered if you had heard about that, been reading a lot about wheat and grain and their effects on the body of late, am seriously considering cutting that out almost completely eventually.
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That was brilliant. Excellent work April!
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April, I hope your economic situation will allow you to continue writing, because posts like these are a joy to read. Your knowledge, intelligence and no-nonsense approach really shine through when you write about nutrition.
Have you considered if becoming a nutritionist might be a way for you to go?
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Thank you! I have, but the schooling is extensive and expensive. Plus, most of it I’ve already self-taught. I can get qualified as a ‘nutritional expert’ in for far less, so that’s what I may aim to do…but I tend to focus on natural remedies more than anything else. The problem is, with people here in the USA, you’re battling uphill on that train of thought. Most are lazy and don’t want to work at or change much…or truly are brainwashed to believe a pill (with even more side effects) will cure everything–and that their doctors are gods who have their best interests in mind, instead of being bought and controlled by Big Pharma .
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Don’t take this wrong because I don’t like Monsanto either but I think “agent orange” was called paraquat not “Round up”. paraquat has been banned from use.
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No offense taken, you could be right. When I researched, it seemed like the same base ingredient (just a slightly less toxic version) repackaged as Roundup. Perhaps not unlike the way Stevia was repackaged as Truvia to get around the ban…But, again…I could be wrong. Let me know if you find out differently? I know they still use paraquat for various crops like peanuts, etc.
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