Frustration with Food rant

[GardenWeasel]

So here I am feeling all good about making healthy food for me and my family. You know whole wheat breads and muffins, cooked oatmeal and barley, making lovely pickles and all. Then--- Norishing Traditions enters my life. Don't get me wrong , love the book but I'm doing it all wrong. Oh you didn't soak those grains, oh no vinegar pickles. Now I get guilty feelings for using cornbread mix. Then enter "Wheat Belly" Oh dear! I can barely look at all that whole wheat flour in my freezer. Any body else share my woes?

 

[Bettacreek]

Pah! Whole wheat, barley, etc is all much better than white bread. Sometimes you have to decide for yourself just how "extreme" you're going to get... You can go all out and obsess about it all, or you can live your life and make healthy choices and still use your cornbread mixes and such. Even making your own whole wheat bread at home will cut out a lot of the preservatives and junk in your life. Now, if you want to go extreme, then by all means, go for it, but in all reality, even a little bit can help, so don't feel like you've done anything wrong! I don't buy organic or anything like that, unless it's cost effective. Sometimes (well, lately) it's been either eat cheaper food or eat nothing at all. So do what you can afford and feel comfortable with.

 

[FarmerChick]

Betta is so right. It is how far you want to go and don't let it become some kind of guilt trip if you eat a Snickers or a piece of bread from the store

We do about 80/20

80% fresh, homemade
and 20% from the store and junk snacks and some flavored drinks when wanted.

I mean I know I can't be a total 100% natural eater. It wouldn't work in my life and I have no desire.

I stopped reading so much LOL

 

[Bettacreek]

Yup, yup, yup! If I worried so much about what was written in books, I'd be a mess by now... Err, well, more than I already am! And remember, books aren't always CORRECT! I've read many a book that I had to put down after so many pages/chapters because of the fallacy in them. Ironically, most of the ones tend to be the extreme health books that suffocate me in fallacy and make me gag. I've since stopped purchasing them and wasting my money on the crap they've written.

 

[so lucky]

But how do you know which ones are fallacy and which ones are politically motivated and which ones are real? 5 years from now, will I read that sprouted grain is poison? That raw milk is really bad for you? That grass-fed beef is full of toxins? I wish there was a central place people could go for truthful information, without bias.

 

[Bettacreek]

But how do you know which ones are fallacy and which ones are politically motivated and which ones are real? 5 years from now, will I read that sprouted grain is poison? That raw milk is really bad for you? That grass-fed beef is full of toxins? I wish there was a central place people could go for truthful information, without bias.

EXACTLY!!!!

 

[Beekissed]

I just let my body and my finances be my guide. If I eat a certain way and I start to exhibit changes in my body that are not for the good, I change the way I am eating. Everyone pretty much knows that eating fresh veggies and fruit are good. Natch.

Homemade breads from unprocessed, unbleached, whole wheat flour is good..folks have been using it for thousands of years and raising families on it. It's filling, it tastes good and my body doesn't reject it in any way.

Whole dairy that isn't from commercial sources is pretty much good unless my body says it isn't...which it doesn't. But it's still something I can't really afford, so I avoid it for that reason.

Vinegar always makes me feel good, no matter how I use it.

Because I am poor, I try to grow or glean much of my own foods~these have all turned out to be healthy choices for my body and my pocketbook.

I must confess..I'm 46 and I've never read one book about what foods are good or bad for you~and I read voraciously just about everything else I can get my hands on . Just living and eating tells me what nourishes my body in healthy way. How do I know what is healthy? How I feel, how many times I don't have to doctor, the general appearance of my skin, hair, body, etc.

The occasional junk food isn't going to kill me because it isn't something in which I indulge on a regular basis. If I find myself indulging in it too much I start to have heart burn, my skin starts to break out, I have bowel changes, etc. My body pretty much tells me to lay off the greasy, salty, very sugary, highly processed foods. I really don't need a book for that.

 

[moolie]

No one book (or person for that matter) has all the answers.

Use common sense, eat foods as close to their natural state as possible, and eat a variety of foods--different coloured fruits and veggies, lots of whole grains etc. Don't stress, it's only food.

(And if you want to take your kids to McDonalds (or whatever floats their boat) once in a while, don't stress about that either--some junk food here and there isn't going to kill anyone.)

We personally prefer organic and local, but do what we have to do in order to afford to eat--which can mean making compromises on certain things like eating less meat if we want to only buy grass-fed/free-range etc. And for us it means doing more work when things are in season in order to preserve our own so that we can stock up things when they are cheapest. We don't buy organic milk, because in Canada it's illegal to use growth hormones etc. so we're not worried about what's in our milk supply. (Can't get raw milk here, even though I grew up on it via my uncle's dairy farm, so I don't stress about it--we just buy whole milk and get on with life).

Some of the fermented stuff doesn't always agree with us, for example my daughter's stomach can't tolerate kefir. I can't stand kombucha. Hubs loves sauerkraut, I only have a bit here and there because I don't like it all the time, the kids can take it or leave it. We do like fermented pickles, but we also like canned pickles made with vinegar--c'est la vie!

And when we were young and broke, we ate as well as we could with our budget. And when hubs was out of work for a year, we ate as well as we could with our budget.

Don't sweat the small stuff, just do your best to take care of yourself/your family and don't take any book/anyone too seriously

 

[GardenWeasel]

Thanks for the heads up, I was tripping over that Wheat Belly book. I didn't even buy it just read some parts of it on the web. I do what I can afford and have the energy for. Guess maybe I should stop comparing what I can do now at almost 60 to my youth when I thought I could do it all.

 

[FarmerJamie]

I checked with one my friends on the comments made on this thread, and here is the response:

Nourishing Traditions is based on the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston A. Price. He studied many cultures pre-WWII that were vibrantly healthy into old age. He even looked at skeletons from museums and burial grounds (some were unearthed, he didn't dig them up) to see that their nutritional status had not changed for hundreds, even thousands, of years. He studied what they ate and how they prepared it. They had vastly varied diets but he documented eleven commonalities to all of them. Nourishing Traditions explains this in a more approachable way than his huge book does. Sally Fallon brings Dr. Price's research into our kitchens.

Yes, many of the cultures he studied ate bread, but it was not made with GMO wheat or modern hybrids. It was not made with yeast. All breads and grains in the groups he studied where fermented for a minimum of two weeks. They would not eat grains otherwise, knowing it would cause health problems.

What people who were ridiculously healthy ate for thousands of years is not extreme. What is extreme is what modern man has done to food in the past century, and the health problems that go along with it. We don't have to buy into that. And it is doable and affordable.

I am not going to publicly post any contact information for my friend, but if you are seriously interested, PM me and I will supply you the info.

From my own personal journey, proper nutrition is on the surface is complicated, but it's more about good habits than following some prescriptive manual. Everyone's personal story is unique, so YMMV.

I try to not let my experiences in the here and now convince me that same rules applied "back then". Just my opinion.

Splurging/indulging, I understand, if you think your life is miserable because your diet won't let you have "x", think about why you think you need "x" and start thinking outside the box for options to satisfy those cravings. Potato chips are my weakness. I have started substituting my own homemade kale chips and finding my craving for potato chips is waning.