It starts with food

The Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that the food industry has until 2018 to eliminate trans fats from food. The New York Times has a good wrap-up of the decision here.

At least it was a good wrap-up, until this:

Saturated fats are still an enormous problem in the American diet, and health experts emphasized that Tuesday’s action should not give consumers a false sense of security.

Saturated fats raise the level of cholesterol in your blood. The general consensus is that high cholesterol levels lead to heart disease. In my opinion, that's what the makers of cholesterol-lowering drugs want you to believe, and they'll go to the ends of the earth to protect their profits.

If you do a Google search for "eating saturated fat," you'll find the information YOU want. If YOU think eating saturated fat is bad for you, you'll find a credible, peer-reviewed article to back you up. If YOU think consuming saturated fat is less of a problem than Big Pharma thinks it is … you'll also be validated.

What if we find out, years from now, that saturated fat – found in butter, meat, cheese, eggs – wasn't the bad guy, but growth hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, or something else the agricultural industry uses to grow more food with less effort and more profit was?

That's a big what if.

I'm not arguing FOR trans-fats. They were invented to make packaged products shelf-stable. In other words, trans-fats were developed to make processed foods last longer and cost less. What consumer doesn't want that?

I'm not arguing FOR saturated fats, either. I eat them, but that's my decision, my menu, and you're free to serve yourself whatever you like. My saturated fats come from grass-fed cows and free-range chickens, for the most part.

I'm mostly arguing AGAINST a pharmaceutical industry that wants you to take their pills every day of your life, and a food industry that cares more about making food cheap than making it healthful. In both cases, these giants are better stewards of their bottom lines than they are of your health and welfare.

And, sadly, our government seems to be complicit.

Rant over.

Pushing the reset button

Woke up at 6-ish this morning, after sleeping for 11 hours, and WE STILL HAVE WATER!

For the first couple days after any kind of basic-necessity disaster (no electricity, no water, no bacon) it's an adventure to flip a switch or turn a faucet. So far, so good.

My plan for today has already changed. Last night when I checked the weather it wasn't supposed to start raining until mid-morning. I'd planned to take a long, long walk beginning at around 8 a.m. I haven't walked in a couple of days (one doesn't want to exert oneself when one can't shower. ahem.) and was really looking forward to getting outside. The temperature is unseasonably warm.

It would have been great.

However. The winds from the west pushed the storms here earlier than predicted, and it's been raining and blowing for half an hour already. The chance of rain all day today is from 80 to 100 percent.

[I'm very glad the lineman came yesterday to hook the power back up to the water pump. That whole apparatus is in a muddy cow pasture, which is surely much muddier now than it was yesterday afternoon.]

So the plan now is to hop on the elliptical and watch a movie.

I'm resetting the food button, after two days of eating crap. [I did pretty well the first two days, not so much Friday and Saturday.] Not total crap, but certainly not enough vegetables, less-than-ideal protein and too. much. sugar.

When one doesn't have water, one doesn't cook. Because one can't clean up the mess. Well, one can, but it's certainly more of an operation than just moistening a sponge, swiping a surface and rinsing the sponge out. I ended up using an entire roll of paper towels during the four days we were H20-less. We ran out of clean dishes and had to switch to disposables. We ate up all the easy-to-nuke leftovers and then just caved to convenience.

I woke up this morning feeling achy and stiff, just like the old days, and blame it on toast with marmalade. Among other indiscretions.

If anything, this experience has reinforced the theory that convenience foods contribute to poor health in ways Big Food couldn't have imagined when they thought they were making life easier by providing grab-and-go meals and snacks.

And I absolutely MUST remember that it matters more what you eat throughout the year than what you eat during the holidays. Or during a short-lived, inconvenient crisis.