Time to get some things off my chest about health, fitness, and nutrition. You may not agree with everyone (or none!), but hopefully they will make you think!
Rant #1 – Why does everything make us fat or give us cancer?
It seems we can’t eat or drink anything these days without being told it will make us fat or cause cancer.
We try to eat canned tuna to eat less fat and get mercury poisoning. We eat fruits and vegetables for the vitamins and fiber and pesticides give us tumors. We eat chicken and get crazy chicken disease and now farm raised salmon will give you swine flu. Wine is good or bad for you depending on whether you eat it with cheese or crackers!
What happened to the old days when we got fat from eating too much cake and got sick from removing too much paint from the walls? Now I heard that you can get cancer from worrying about getting cancer.
Rant #2 – Low Carb Beer
Do brewing companies seriously think they can make people believe they are selling diet beer? With all their talk about who has 1 gram less carb in a tablespoon than the other, they seem to forget that it’s actually the ALCOHOL in their product that makes you fat!
Alcohol not only basically kills fat-burning enzymes, but is also preferentially stored as fat and severely disrupts the body’s production of muscle-building hormones like testosterone.
I guess saying “low carb” sounds better than saying “watery.” Next, they’ll add caffeine and Gatorade and call it “performance beer.”
Rant #3 – “Nutrient of the Week” Bandwagon Marketing
You listened? Froot Loops are now healthy because they contain added calcium! They contain added calcium because someone decided to add a big bag of chalk to the sugary goo they’re made from. Now you can give it to your sugar crazed ADD kids with a clear conscience because now it is healthy for them because it has CALCIUM.
I’m waiting for the day when some clever salesman will take a piece of plain blackboard chalk and sell it as a “calcium stir stick” for his coffee.
I also love it when a product that’s been around for 30 years suddenly claims it’s now “fat free” or “low carb” even though it always has been and everyone knows it. “Fat-free” or “low-carb” water is not the revolutionary product it claims to be.
But what really takes the cake are the vitamin companies that proudly jump on the nutrient bandwagon yelling “Look! We’ve had it all along!” when your pills are so tightly compressed and unabsorbable, you can still read the brand stamp when they come out the other end (got it on good authority from a certain Port-o-Potty specialist I know)!
Rant #5 – Making Low Carb Foods From Foods That Shouldn’t Be Low Carb
Orange juice should not be low carb. I do not care what they say. If I want low carb orange juice, I’ll add my own water instead of paying the juice company to add it for me and charging me extra for the privilege. That’s all I have to say about it.
Rant #6: Trying to pass off unhealthy foods as healthy
Pork Rinds Lite – now with 25% less fat, sodium, cholesterol, lead and cyanide.
Even if you take a token percentage of the bad stuff out of a bad food, it’s still bad food. It’s like buying reduced-fat lard: it’s still lard. Now it has a nicer name. It’s so easy to reduce the fat in a serving by making the serving smaller anyway, what’s the point? Who’s going to sit down and eat just 3 cheese doodles?
When I eat a food that I know is bad, I know it’s bad, but sometimes I’ll eat it anyway. I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to sue you for making unhealthy food. Nobody is putting a gun to my head to eat me. I don’t think for a second that slightly lowering the “perceived badness” of a food in any way now makes it “healthy”. So please don’t try to sweeten this delicious crap unless it’s for flavor.
Rant #7 – The Incredible Diet Patch
The only way to lose weight with the diet patch is if you put it over your mouth. ’nuff said.
Rant #8 – Expensive urine and other attacks on supplements
Even to this day, there are doctors who believe that taking vitamins will only result in expensive urine. They believe that you can get all the vitamins and minerals you need in a balanced diet. Unfortunately, the only balanced diet some people get is when they try to bring 3 plates to the table with one hand.
Jumping right into prescribing expensive drugs to mask symptoms for people who probably just desperately need basic nutrition is the epitome of expensive urine, in my opinion.
And then there’s creatine. You may remember the uproar a few years ago when some of the “don’t confuse us with the facts” media jumped into a story about the deaths of some high school wrestlers. They were taking creatine to enhance their performance, so obviously it must have killed them. It certainly wasn’t because they were taking long steam baths in rubber suits and exercising intensely without drinking enough water to desperately gain weight for a wrestling match. It must have been the horrible supplement that did it because no one has ever died from catastrophic dehydration or heat stroke, right?
Let me clarify: there is nothing dangerous in creatine. It is a natural substance that is already in your body in quantity. It is found in every piece of meat you eat. The only way creatine could harm you is if someone drops a bucket on your foot.
Supplements only seem to make news when someone has something bad to say about them, regardless of whether it’s true or not.