Malnourished means not just under nourished or starving, but badly nourished. Nourished means not just fed but encouraged, promoted, or fostered. We are malnourished – we are badly fed. We are badly fostered. As revolting as the line ups around a certain American donut chain were when it came to Mississauga, there was the taste of them that got you. Sweet and soft, many people found they could Hoover in a tray load with no effort at all. Part of an extended childhood perhaps, that adults are so fond of sweets. Part of the art of denial that donuts are considered breakfast. Long before the ban in New York, I took a lunch and learn session with a dietician from the cardiac rehab clinic here in Toronto regarding food labels and how to read them. Truly I’d just never been to such a thing, but I really thought I understood how to read the labels. I didn’t. And when she got to the bit about trans fats she announced that although the data hadn’t been released yet and she couldn’t say anything definitive before her lab officially did so, she admonished us not to eat them at all. Ever. There is no safe amount. But I’ve actually heard of trans fats activists now fighting for the rights of trans fats to be allowed in food, even though the full implications of them make the researchers who found out wake up in a cold sweat. If you are a North American, you chances of getting type two diabetes (like both my parents, one sibling, and two aunts) is rising faster than the planets temperature. Your chances of developing heart disease, if you are Canadian, is 1 in 2. And likely rising. But still, poorly fostered we remain poorly fed. The advertising budgets of prepackaged and easy foods are huge, backed by research into human behavior and psychologist who specialize in the target age range. Kids get cartoons aimed at them, adults have their harried life styles and fear of aging aimed at them. Yes, the baked pie only takes about six minutes in the microwave to give you a nutritious lunch – of almost 700 calories, part of that trans fat, all of it lightly coated in chemicals from the heat n’ seal wrapper. The average person gets way more than 1500 to 2000 calories a day that’s recommended, significantly more calories from fat than we should have. Five to ten servings a day in vegetables? Most of my friends no longer have the intestinal flora to successfully deal with that. And we don’t count the beverages, the alcohol, the cola, the heated and chemically changed milk in our specialty coffee beverages. Badly fostered by media, badly fed by ourselves we don’t notice the evil we eat. This week it was announced conclusively that Napoleon did not die of arsenic poisoning, but of stomach cancer. Does that mean he wasn’t poisoned? If the cancer began from dietary choices, did this great man unwittingly poison himself? Now that we know better, are we willingly poisoning ourselves into disease and rising health care costs and pain? I’d say we are. If a soft and greasy donut had the immediate feeling of drinking milk with ground glass in it, we wouldn’t do it. Since the effects are delayed, we do. And I am so very guilty of letting things slide, eating muffins for breakfast, eating food on the go, not hewing time out of my schedule to cook. Turning a blind eye when people I love treat a large bag of chips as single serving, I also drink like a portly fish and ignore the implications. Last night all I really wanted was ice cream. Last night a bed opened up in the hospital my dad needs to go to, for whatever kind of surgery will open his heart up again. They’re thinking either triple or quadruple bypass and I know they’ve gotten better at this type of surgery, and I spoke to him yesterday and he was chipper and flirting with nurses. Still unnerves me, his helicopter ride last night and the uncertainty of the outcome. And the fact that even with the reasons his health is so poor, all I really wanted was about a pound of butterscotch ice cream with maple syrup. I think I’ll find some crayons and colour instead. I eat and drink by my own hands now and will try, as hard as I can, to foster myself better, ignoring media as much as possible. I felt helpless that I couldn't do more for him than be there emotionally for him, talk to him and reassure him that we were okay. Maybe I can do more though, if I can set a good example for my parents.
It's a very weird world today.