Watch What You Eat - Or Not
I managed to avoid most of the "diets" being promoted when I was growing up. Our family, rather poor by today's standards, ate well nevertheless. I was never hungry. On the flip side of the coin, no one - at least that I'm aware of - every went on a "diet." I remember the subject of diets coming up once or twice, with my father giving his usual good dose of common sense advice: "Just watch what you eat."
It seemed like sound advice at the time, although I'm not exactly sure what he really meant by "watching." He did have certain things he didn't like, although they weren't many. If he didn't like something, he would just say so, or simply not eat it. Maybe that's what he meant. Watch what you eat; if you don't like what you see, just don't eat it - or something like that.
In any case, the only food restrictions I remember developed as my parents aged and my mother, for example, cut down on her intake of certain foods because they might disturb her heart, for which she had to take nitroglycerine pills when she hit her 60s. But, again, no one called any of this a "diet."
So this LA Times article caught my attention, since I've personally come up against many if not most of the situations the author writes about here.
Maybe growing up with little made me thankful that we had full meals on the table three times a day. The idea of parsing through the food wasn't even an option. As for certain foods being disagreeable, I think most of us can figure that out for ourselves without all the research, products, health coaches, or whatever else the food-diet industry concocts.
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It seemed like sound advice at the time, although I'm not exactly sure what he really meant by "watching." He did have certain things he didn't like, although they weren't many. If he didn't like something, he would just say so, or simply not eat it. Maybe that's what he meant. Watch what you eat; if you don't like what you see, just don't eat it - or something like that.
In any case, the only food restrictions I remember developed as my parents aged and my mother, for example, cut down on her intake of certain foods because they might disturb her heart, for which she had to take nitroglycerine pills when she hit her 60s. But, again, no one called any of this a "diet."
So this LA Times article caught my attention, since I've personally come up against many if not most of the situations the author writes about here.
When you look at health trends over the long term, the only certainty is their inevitable reversal. The fat-free diet of the 1980s and '90s, hailed at the time as the definitive guide for how we should eat, is now being thoroughly debunked. Think of all the money and meals you wasted on fat-free ice cream and bone-dry chicken breasts that didn't do you a lick of good.While there are people who have legitimate issues with certain foods, I'm coming around to the view that much of the "gluten-free" trend right now is based on people convincing themselves that either they must eat gluten-free or that they feel better somehow if they do. I'm also convinced that people think too much about what they eat, in a kind of obsessive perversion of my Dad's advice to "Watch what you eat."
Maybe growing up with little made me thankful that we had full meals on the table three times a day. The idea of parsing through the food wasn't even an option. As for certain foods being disagreeable, I think most of us can figure that out for ourselves without all the research, products, health coaches, or whatever else the food-diet industry concocts.
More...
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