In the past three installments on modern eating disorders, we looked at diets the vilify everything from eggs, meat, dairy, grains, starches and of course, animal fats. Each camp maintains that their way is the ONLY way to eat and that touching foods from their forbidden list will surely cause anyone to meet with a sudden, untimely death. Furthermore, they also have additional lists of forbidden foods which could be anything ranging from tomatoes to citrus fruit. They have zapped virtually all enjoyment of food from this life as they sneer down their noses at the rest of us looking to find a balanced way of enjoying the very foods that have kept our ancestors surviving until the modern age.
With so much conflicting information, it is no wonder that many people have just given up. Such is the case of obese people who have been completely misled on diet. They often find themselves eating “the right foods” and gaining a ton of weight. With so many foods off the acceptable list and weight careening out of control, they are left with little choice but to get bariatric surgery — a procedure which either removes, reroutes or or ties off a portion of the stomach so that it can only hold a few TABLESPOONS of food at a time.
Doctors and patients hail this procedure as the go-to solution for the morbidly obese. Initially, recipients lose weight effortlessly as they have no appetite. Then their blood sugar and certain other stats, such as blood pressure, seem to fall within the acceptable range. But eventually, the plan backfires. Even though the dieter receives vitamins which are supposed to replace all the nutrients they no longer get from food, their hair begins to fall out, diarrhea and other digestive upsets form and up to 40% of surgery recipients end up hospitalized during the first 6 months due to complications.
But they aren’t the only ones. An increasing number of people are whittling down their food consumption in favor of vitamins, powders and food substitutes for fear of what Food will do to their bodies. Perhaps the most disturbing case I have recently read about is the case of Rob Rhinehart. A 24-year old software engineer, Rhinehart feels that he NEVER has to eat food again! This young man believes that after millions of years of survival on the planet, he’s stumbled upon the perfect solution to the impractical practice of cooking and eating food. Frying an egg, he claims, is too much hassle — what he does to make egg-frying such a time consuming and messy affair, I have no idea.
Every morning, he prepares a shake full of supplement powders as purchased in bulk from various online outlets. To this blend, he adds some oil, water and a few other ingredients. Rhinehart doesn’t feel he’s extreme because he will eat out socially on occasion. But on such a diet, I can’t see that he feels terribly social on a regular basis.
These may seem like extreme cases, but there are an increasing number of doctors who are so confused over what to eat that they not only endorse these practices, they actually invent some. A handful of steamed vegetables without fat, salt or … flavor is the order of the day — a knee-jerk reaction brought on by a confused mind. And yes, doctors who routinely do NOT study nutrition seem to be leading the pack with these insane and punishing diets.
So if avoiding everything isn’t the answer, what is? Don’t say moderation. I’ve already established in a previous article that moderation is merely a cover for anti-Food eaters to continue eating less Food and more junk.
