Wherever you go for health-related ‘news’, you’re likely to encounter a lot of negativity. Obesity is on the rise. Ultra-processed foods are engineered to be addictive. Sugar and seed oils are omnipresent, along with residues of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals. Corporations seem to be poisoning people for profit. Collective health statistics are deteriorating. Doctors have effectively become drug dealers for pharmaceutical companies. The system appears to have evolved to push us towards consuming addictive food (feeding Big Food) and predictably making us ill (to feed Big Pharma). And what about electromagnetic field exposure and chemtrails?
The poster case of negativity is this famous American Health Crisis Roundtable, where a constellation of influencers (‘experts’) delivered a very convincing ‘negative’ message. The message was very correct, based on facts which reinforce the notion of very dim reality when it comes to health and, particularly, prevalence of ultraprocessed food. I put the ‘experts’ in quotation marks for the single reason that most of those influencers make living by peddling various supplements which are nothing else but a genre of ultraprocessed stuff. So, some of them are far from being impartial – nevertheless, the message itself is very correct. The state of things is bad.
Depressing? Maybe. But what if it’s true? Unfortunately, much of it is. In this case, the negativity is not only justified but a necessary step towards correcting what’s wrong. So, why the negativity and what’s exactly wrong? Let’s restrict ourselves only to subjects concerning health and well-being.
You can get your answer the next time you go to a supermarket. Just look at what people have in their shopping carts. Is that stuff good or bad for them? Can they be healthy if they consume that every day? I have a habit, for better or worse, of glimpsing into almost every shopping cart. In my case, the typical description of what I see is: ‘Horrible’. That’s 90% of the time. Then there are a few cases where there’s a mix of good and bad stuff. And then there are very rare occasions when everything in the cart is good. That’s probably less than 1 time out of 100.
Let’s presume one knows everything about which foods are good for health and which to avoid. You know, pesticides, Dirty Dozen fruits and vegetables, sugar, additives… all that stuff proven to be bad for health. It’s there, on the shelves of every supermarket, for the sole reason that it’s profitable to sell it. At the same time, it’s proven to be bad for health yet legal to sell. Yes, food producers are essentially poisoning us for profit.
Even more soul-scorching is seeing kids buying sweets and instant noodle soup – and that’s all they’re buying. That’s conditioning them for life… conditioning which is harmful to health but will be associated with their childhood… conditioning that will be very difficult to unlearn if they ever learn how unhealthy that stuff is. They may never unlearn it.
Now, you know it all and want to avoid buying only food free of stuff known to be bad for health. The problem is that you can’t avoid it entirely. There are very few items of clean food one can get in any particular supermarket. It differs a bit by country and neighbourhood but, generally, most of the products in any supermarket should not be consumed. They’re not good for health one way or another.
For me, it’s a rigid habit to go into any supermarket knowing that 99% of the products there are not good. The ones I frequent usually have only a single-digit item list which I buy – certain bio cheese, kefir, cottage cheese, canned venison without additives, occasional almonds, cayenne pepper and Himalayan salt, bio red wine, avocados, bio apples… that’s pretty much it. Like 10 items out of thousands of items in any such supermarket.
Where do I get my food from? My staple food I get directly from producers which are regenerative agriculture farms. Egg delivery once a week. Meat delivery usually every 2 weeks. Occasional delivery of avocados and seasonal fruits and vegetables.
Is it always possible? No. At least not for me, not in the current real-life conditions. On those occasions when I have to compromise on food quality, I intend to remain mindful about it. Sugar? Very rarely and very little – think about how to burn off that fast energy and recover from low-intensity inflammation the sugar causes and regain gut health. Grains? The same as sugar plus think of how much dry fasting will be necessary to burn out the nasty pesticides. Non-bio meat? Think of dry fasting again to burn out the nasties in the form of residues of therapeutic antibiotics and pesticides as those animals were possibly fed the worst kind of non-bio feed.
Back to the issue of negativity. If only less than 1% of products in your supermarket are good, negativity about it is not only justified but necessary for awareness. If you don’t touch those 99% of outright harmful products, this negativity is not applied to your food choices. Yet, the negativity serves a noble purpose until the remaining 99% make a different consumer choice. If nobody buys, it will not be there. Supermarkets are in business to make money, they sell what people buy, even if that means being part of the established chain which, effectively, poisons people for profit.
But let’s look at all this in a positive way. There are still supply channels available for healthy food (even if it doesn’t come with the convenience of shopping in the supermarket) – use those channels, choose your food carefully for great benefit to yourself and, ultimately, for the greater good.