If you truly want to understand and are willing to accept the truths of the world; education is a powerful thing. The older I get the more I understand about life’s realities. I have always had a thirst for knowledge, and over recent years I have tried my best to learn more about nutrition (among other things). Being a vegetarian; I’ve had to educate myself on what is optimal for my body, because I choose to understand what is and is not healthy for human consumption. I now feel like I took the red pill and woke up in the Matrix every time I enter a grocery store. I cannot unknow what I know.  A grocery shopping trip is a scavenger hunt to find actual ingredients to make a somewhat healthy meal, as most grocery stores are full of prepackaged, processed food-like products. In the United States, especially, it is acceptable to sell items that are known it will cause health problems in the long term. There are no controls, a lot of deceptive marketing and mass confusion for the average person who would even try to find healthier options for themselves and their families.

We live in a world of endless selections of items that can cause grave harm if consistently ingested.  Junk food tastes delicious, full of fats, sugars, empty calories, and ingredients designed to make you crave more.  Designed in labs, backed by corporate funding to make their items last longer on the shelves and sell faster and more abundant to consumers.  It is not designed to provide any nutritional value or increase human longevity. The food industry is big business about profit, not fuel for human nutrition. There is no question as to why America has an obesity problem. A problem which leads to a health care crisis. If you have health issues, what you feed your body is contributing to it. A lot of preventable diseases could be eliminated by simply having a better diet. 

I have been fortunate enough to travel to many countries and I know some places are catching up to America’s junk food epidemic, but a lot recognize the issues and have chosen another path. Many countries do not allow high fructose corn syrup in soda and other snacks, and they teach children about nutrition from a very young age so that they can make better choices growing up. Where the US just banned some food coloring and dyes, these items have always been illegal in most places overseas. Why don’t we, as a society, care about what is considered food? Are sugary snacks so addictive that we don’t give a second thought to what effect it has on our body? Unfortunately, I think the answer is yes. It is up to us, as the consumer, to weed through the garbage and to be aware of what we are putting in our bodies, but most do not.  We eat for convenience; we eat what is fast and what is easily available. Food packaging is marketing, not necessarily factual information. It can be hard to tell what is food and what is not. Shopping for groceries shouldn’t be this hard (or expensive).

I know not everyone will take the time to educate themselves on proper nutrition until they are forced too due to a health concern, and just like personal finance, these are things that should be taught at the elementary school level and reinforced in high school. Keeping yourself healthy is the most important task you will undertake as a human. Without health all other pursuits are irrelevant. Society has such a lackadaisical approach to what we eat, which is why fast food is so popular, even though it is not good for you overall.

Being conscious of the food we eat is a never-ending struggle, from fast food to the grocery store, it is hard to know what is optimal for fuel instead of what is optimal for our taste buds. How can you know what you are actually getting in those boxes or packages? Well, find the ingredients and read what is listed, do you recognize any of the names, can you even pronounce it? That’s probably the first tip that it’s more processed than food. Is it something your grandparents or better yet great grandparents would recognize? If not, then maybe it’s time to start questioning if it is truly something we should eat?