I grew up in the seventies in a family that ate together every night. Mom had grown up on a ranch and was used to canning their harvest from the garden every year. She never gardened, but living in Northern California we had access to fruits and vegetables in abundance, and mom would get a bunch of them and can them.
Overall, we ate pretty decent. We had dessert every night, but at least it was homemade from scratch, no boxes, and a lot of the canning mom did was jams and jellies so our intake of processed foods was less than it could have been. Obviously the flour and sugar we’re still refined but it cut down on anything sweet that was pre-made from the store. And of course, there weren’t GMO’s in the seventies.
Most everyone was skinny. In my twenties my diet quality dropped. I worked in fast food and ate a lot of fast food. I’ve never been one to cook, it’s always been for one, so I would eat whatever was easy to assemble. Microwave popcorn was a meal more than once. Eating food in the microwave was common. Frozen dinners were common.
I was in my thirties in the nineties when the weight slowly started to add up. By the time I was in my forties I started looking at “dieting “seriously. I found the protein power diet was beneficial and I actually lost weight. But in the early 2000’s there weren’t a bunch of recipes and staying low carb all the time was outside of “the norm” enough to become too difficult. And the weight slowly accumulated again.
I had no idea that not only was I eating worse then how I did growing up, the food I was eating was changing without my knowledge. The fat was being removed, and sugar was being added. Salt was being reduced. After sugar was added to just about everything it was also replaced with high fructose corn syrup, and MSG wasn’t only in Chinese food.
As it turns out, microwaving food damages it. Then they started modifying foods on the genetic level and mixing DNA in plants and animals.
In my fifties I started reading labels. There is a lot of stuff that is not food that we are eating. In the middle part of the teens, around 2017, GMO’s had to be labeled. As a label reader, I was shocked that just about everything I picked up, said “partially produced with genetic engineering” before I even read the ingredients. Then I discovered that pork, shrimp, lobster, etc. are bad four up for you. Which makes sense if you think about it that God told people not to eat them. He knew how they were made. Pigs have parasites, don’t sweat, and have a short digestion cycle. Shrimp clean the carcasses and are garbage scows.
After forty years of eating whatever, I have begun reaping the health issues. Now I have to eat right and undo what has been done if I want to be healthy and enjoy life.
Are Organic Foods Healthier?