We Are What We Eat

I don't care how you feel about it or whether or not you're sitting there shaking your head or going, "OK, but~~" the truth is: you are what you eat, and that's fact. If you didn't eat--or, OK, if you're going to get all nit-picky and talk about tube-feeding and intravenous blah-blah-blah, fine: take nourishment into your body, OK?--you would die. Sooner or later, after your body cannibalized itself for nutrients, you would die. Your body is made up of what you put into it, and most of us do that via the food we put into our mouths.

I want you to stop for a minute and think about that. This one body, the only one you'll never have, is completely dependent on what you put into it. What you put into it determines how well it functions and how it feels, how it reacts to stress and bacteria, allergens and injury. It depends on you to provide it with iron and vitamin C, carbohydrates (and if you believe you can live without those, you need to step away from the fad diet books and get some factual information about nutrients) and protein, lipids and lutein.

One of my all-time favorite foods is Cheetos. I love Cheetos! Once upon a time, I ate them every day. Cheetos and Coke. My god. The food of gods! A treat! A snack! Something to look forward to at the end of a long day of subbing! Perfect for road trips! Excellent in every way!

Now, before you imagine that I used to be some huge behemoth and that I Saw the Light and had gastric by-pass and swore off Cheetos only because, gee, post-surgery, even a tiny bag is surely the route to puking, given that it's more than a half a cup of food introduced into a newly-tiny space, no. No, none of that is the case. I quit eating Cheetos because I realized they weren't doing anything useful for my body. Oh, sure: I can hear those of you who are saying too much self-discipline is the route to a boring life, that we all need treats, that we should have some little indulgences now and then. And I agree:  we need treats. We need indulgences. But at what expense? To you, a couple donuts may seem like a once-in-a-while, well-deserved treat. Or a bag of Cheetos every now and then. But what would your body say--your intestines and your liver, your heart and lungs and spleen and all those organs that are working night and day, continuously, to make it possible for you to get up and walk into the bathroom to pee, to reach out and click the mouse to open this post, to sit there in that chair and breathe? What would they say about the treats? Here's what's in Cheetos, as nearly as I can tell, seeing as how I don't have an actual bag here with me and so must rely on on-line information that, tellingly, does *not* appear on The Official Cheetos Website (I did not provide the link because I don't want them coming to gritch at me about how healthy their snacks are.). This list is from answers.yahoo, and in case there are any people from FritoLay checking out this link, I'm not vouching for the accuracy, OK? From what I can remember of my Cheeto-eating days, however, it seems reasonable:

Enriched Corn Meal (Corn Meal, Ferrous Sulfate, Niacin, Thiamin Monoitrate,Riboflavin, and Frolic [huh? frolic acid? That's a joke, right?] Acid), Vegetable Oil (Contains one or more of the following: corn, soybean, or sunflower oil), Whey, Salt, Cheddar Cheese, (Cultured Milk, Salt, Enzymes). Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Maltodextrin, Disodium Phosphate, Sour Cream (Cultured Cream, Nonfat Milk), Artificial Flavor, Monosodium Glutmate [OK, somebody needs to learn how to copy words from the back of the bag, people!], Lactic Acid, Artificial Colors (Including Yellow 6), and Citric Acid. Contains Milk Ingredients

NOTE: OK, so this is a lousy list, rife with mistakes. Go to your kitchen and get a bag of Cheetos and check for yourself, OK? And, hey, you people in those online forums? Activate spellcheck, please!

Think about what this means to your body, these ingredients (or what these would be if you tell from the spelling). And while you're at it, you might wonder about why there are so many corn-related products involved. If you're not sure, you might want to Netflix King Corn and find out some reasons why corn meal and corn oil and high-fructose corn syrup seem to be present in just about everything you buy in a package. Think it's because those things are really high in nutrients your one precious body is begging you to supply? Think again.

I really want y'all to think about this, not just dismiss my rantings about food as being some obsession of mine. If you feel fabulous, if you've had the lab work done and all your nutrient levels are spot on, if you have energy and stamina and wake up in the morning ready to go, then fine. Obviously what you're eating is working for you. But if you don't feel so great, or if you've got some wonky things going on with your cholesterol or glucose levels or hormones, or if you're tired all the time or have a headache a couple times a week or have to take a little purple pill because you've got stomach stuff that's keeping you awake at night, well. There's another way to live. Every time I write about food and eating, nutrition and weight and exercise, I get all these gritchy, irritated responses from people who want to argue. I can't change their minds. I can't change people's behavior and the beliefs they hold to justify the things they do. If you really believe you can be 50 pounds overweight and still be healthy, I can't convince you otherwise. I can't show you the cross-sections of human cadavers that show the internal fat encasing your heart and lungs. I can't convince you what it means that, for every extra pound you carry, you're putting four extra pounds of pressure on the joints in your hips and knees and ankles. I can't convince you that sodas (or cokes or soda waters or whatever you call them in the part of the country where you live) are insults to your body. I can tell you that when I gave up drinking cokes--which I did the day I realized I had drunk a six-pack, all by myself, over the course of the day--I quit having sinus headaches, something I'd had once a week or so for all my adult life. Gone. In the decade+ since I gave them up, I think I may have taken a Benadryl once, for an allergic reaction to some coconut shampoo. Before, when I was drinking them every day? I never left home without Benadryl. Never.

Since changing my diet and eliminating almost all processed foods, most sugar, ALL high-fructose corn syrup, virtually all animal products (except cheese! I haven't conquered my Love of Cheese yet), etc., etc., etc., I can tell you this: I haven't had hives (a serious problem when I was younger, along with a whole host of other skin stuff from pityriasis rosea to eczema), I hardly ever have any kind of headache, I have not, um, how to put this delicately? been nauseated to the point of, well--you know--in over 20 years. Because I don't eat animal products, my health care providers figure I'm lacking in various nutrients and periodically order lab work, and everything checks out amazingly well:  the tests done last week show everything is normal (although I could use a little more iron), with no evidence of any inflammation anywhere in my body, which is good. And pretty amazing for someone my age.

While I do take vitamins and supplements--mostly for arthritis--the only prescription drug I take is estrogen, and I take no pain relievers or other over-the-counter drugs except a low-dose aspirin every day, as recommended. If I needed to, I would--it's not that I've foresworn them all forever. And it's not that I'll never eat another Cheeto. Sometimes I have some, for old times' sake. But I know they're not doing anything useful for my body, so eating them really isn't very much fun any more.

Now. I know--and so don't whinge at me, please:  I'm not naive. I know lots of people, OK? So I know there are all kinds of issues about all kinds of things--that there are things you can't prevent. There's nothing I can do about arthritis. I might have been able to keep from having some hip and knee issues if I hadn't run for 15 years, but there's nothing I can do now. They think much of what's going on is genetic, from my dad. But I could probably have prevented the melanoma if I hadn't spent years lying in the sun and hadn't allowed my dermatologist back in high school to treat my hives with "light treatment." Again, nothing I can do about that now. So, no, I'm not saying you can treat/prevent everything with diet. But I am saying you can do a lot, a whole lot, way, way more than most people are willing to admit, by very carefully monitoring and changing the things you put into your body. This is where someone will send me a note saying that life isn't worth living if you can't enjoy good food with friends and family, and that we're meant to celebrate and enjoy the earth's bounty. OK, I'll grant you that. But I don't think "the earth's bounty" really includes Ding Dongs and Slim Jims and Dr. Pepper.

Think about what you're doing when you eat those things, when you eat genetically modified food and irradiated food and Twinkies and Pop Tarts and white bread and anything else created in a factory. You're putting this stuff into a body with an amazingly intricate architecture of bones and sinew, veins and tendons, and asking it--telling it!--to figure out what to do with aspartame and olestra and sulfites, things bodies did not evolve to process. Why would you do that? And why, just because none of those make your body immediately explode, would you assume that putting them into your body is OK? To me, putting sucralose in my body is no different from pouring Kool-Aid in the gas tank of my car: I expect it's going to ruin it, but I obviously must not care or I wouldn't do it. Do people really hate their bodies that much?

People tell me, "Oh, I love to eat! I'll eat anything!" To them, it means they enjoy life, live with gusto, embrace All of Earth's Bounty, even the stuff they can't pronounce. To me, that sounds as if they think of their body as a cross between a food processor and a garbage disposal.

It's your choice. You can eat half a dozen times a day, having, maybe, a total of 3 hours (30 minutes each) of happiness in feeding yourself cupcakes and hamburgers and Dove Bars and that thick, rich, cream gravy your grandmother always made that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and then spend the other 21 hours of the day with the consequences of your body trying to extract the necessary nutrients from those treats and dispose somehow of all the rest. Or you can believe what I'm saying and do some research and experimentation on your own and find out what it feels like to feed your body the things it needs in order to serve you well.

Is my diet perfect? Oh, hell, no. I eat a cookie every morning, and I probably don't want to know what's in them, even though they come in the dairy case and have to be baked. And I have some of The EGE's decadent frappacinnos. I use artificial creamer in my coffee--once I read the ingredients on the soy creamer and realized they were just about the same, I gave up and went back to the artificial stuff.

But for the most part, I give my body what it tells me it needs. I listen to it, and I try to provide it with the most nutrient-rich foods I can. The lab work says I'm doing it right, but the key is the way I feel when I wake up in the morning. That right there is worth almost any dietary sacrifice, let me tell you.

Experiment, see how you feel. Your body will thank you in ways you can't even imagine.