Finding health in a modern world

When I first told my 90-year-old grandmother that I was becoming a nutrition consultant, she had difficulty understanding how teaching people what to eat could be a job.

She was born in a different time when food was still real, whole, and made a short trip from the farm to the dinner table. She fondly recounts the days spent milking cows, collecting eggs, and feeding the animals.

When refined foods were introduced into our food supply, my grandmother and her peers strayed from their real food habits in favor of what was faster and more convenient. Grandma didn’t need a lesson in how and what to eat when she was growing up, but now she does. Now, we all do.

Modern grocery stores are enormous and filled with aisle after aisle of packaged, processed “foods” that your grandmother would not have seen in the kitchen of her youth. Those of us in subsequent generations were, by contrast, raised on pasteurized milk products, refined grains, and sugar-laden foods like boxed macaroni and cheese, bottled or canned sodas, and commercial cereals. Even health-conscious families scooped up boxes of instant oats, whole grain breads, and non-fat yogurts.

When we began to eat foods created in factories rather than grown on farms, we moved steadily away from health-promoting foundational nutrition and closer to building our bodies’ tissues from edible, yet synthetic, nutrient-poor, “food-like” substances. Isn’t it obvious that problems would arise? It’s pretty clearly seen in the declining health and vitality of the majority of people around us.

Today, medication keeps my grandmother alive as her body suffers the consequences of decades of eating processed foods and dealing with undiagnosed food allergies. It’s sad that the majority of her severe health conditions could have been avoided by shunning factory foods when they began to appear on grocery store shelves. Still, my grandmother is lucky. A foundation of better childhood nutrition (pre-processed food, at the very least) allowed the development of a hearty survival mechanism. Her constitution is much sturdier than that of children today, who are not only born to mothers that were raised on modern processed foods, but are also fed commercially prepared infant formula that we are told is as safe and as healthy as breast milk, even though it is not. If Grandma had been raised on the foods that most people currently consume on a regular basis, she likely wouldn’t have made it to age ninety.

your constitution

Your physical state of health and robustness—the foundation you may have, at varying levels, to maintain or achieve optimal health with more or less effort. For example, a person who was born to a healthy and robust mother, birthed naturally, breast-fed until self-weaned, and transitioned to whole, real food is likely to have a more robust constitution than someone without these advantages who was immediately fed an unhealthy diet of cereals and refined foods during his or her formative years.

I have explained to Grandma that most food today isn’t produced the way it was when she was a kid, and therein lies the problem. I tell her that it’s important to seek out and support the rare individuals who produce food with “old school” values in mind. After many decades of relying on processed food, much of these discussions fail to “stick.” She remembers my “cookie monster” days and offers me some when I visit her, forgetting that I no longer eat such things. When I remind her that I feel better when I don’t eat those foods, I always ask her: Do I look hungry? It’s a cheeky question, but it proves the point that sufficient nourishment is found in foods that aren’t derived from grains.

Grandma was intrigued when I told her that not only were people quite confused about what to eat, but that a change in nutrition—yes, a simple change in food —could actually help people feel better. Hence, the need for my profession.

Even people who have taken multiple medications for years to manage symptoms can resolve their health issues by changing their diets. This concept befuddled my grandmother partly because doctors, in her mind, are the final word, and they never offered dietary solutions. She lives with medical issues ranging from gallbladder disease to thyroid and other autoimmune complications, as well as diverticulitis and massive sciatic pain. I’m confident that she also has undiagnosed Celiac disease (a condition caused by gluten intolerance).

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED GLUTEN?

The word gluten is often used as an umbrella term for the gliadin protein or a number of other constituents in grains to which people can react negatively. Gluten is found in grains and by-products of wheat, barley, rye, triticale, oats (typically from cross-contamination), and other grains, as well as in some other foods where these grains are used in processing.

After a bout with colon cancer last year, I told my grandmother that she has an allergy to gluten. It seemed that she might more readily accept a dietary explanation for a disease of the digestive system. I sent her home with gluten-free bread and other options. Even though I don’t recommend these for most people, this 90-year-old was hardly about to give up her morning toast or afternoon cookies. I simply hoped for at least a small change in her routine.

A few days after she got home from the hospital, I asked how she was feeling. She reported that she no longer had the pain in her abdomen that she had experienced every day for as long as she could remember. Other food-regulated issues aside, what appeared to be a lifelong food allergy—constantly aggravated by continuous exposure to gluten—subsided for reasons that escaped her. One cannot help but wonder if this long-term intolerance was modulating other aspects of her health as she aged. Hearing her say that she didn’t feel the same pain was enough to solidify in my mind that she had suffered needlessly—likely for decades.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14