What Foods Did They Say Would Kill You When You Were Growing Up?

Merry Christmas Everyone!!

With holiday feasts just about to hit the table and half-hearted New Year's Resolutions just around the corner, I'm currently trying to map out a theoretical diet/fitness plan for 2020.

As singles, do others here feel the pressure as well to try to "keep yourself up" in the hopes that you someday might find someone? (And if you're married, do you feel the need or pressure to try your best to look good for your spouse?)

While trying to write out some goals and eating strategies to help keep me on track, I couldn't help but think of how much diet and nutrition seems to have changed over the years.

I grew up in the era of Richard Simmon's "Sweatin' to the Oldies" and Susan Powter's sermon-like command to "Stop the (Dieting) Insanity!"




Her infamous infomercials preached to hopeful, eager believers, "It's not food that makes you fat -- it's the fat that's making you fat!!!"

And with that, most of American society seemed to go on a merciless quest in order to try to zap as much fat as possible from their diets, being told instead to load up on pasta, rice, and fat-free cereal, with even bags of jellybeans bragging that they were "A Fat-Free Food!"

Pringles soon boasted a "fat-free" version of their beloved crisps -- but never mind that this new, "healthy" rendition of their product would result in having to lock yourself in the bathroom for half the afternoon (please, don't ask me how I know.)

Put down that donut, and here, have a fat free cookie instead!!! (What they didn't tell us, of course, is that they replaced all the fat with more sugar.)

And so, one of the toughest pieces of advice I'm trying to absorb from current dieting advice is that "Fat is good, and in fact, most of what your body should be running on!" (GOOD fats, that is), and now carbs (the very things we were told to base our diets on while I was growing up) are the new enemy that should be avoided at all cost.

So now instead of 4 1/2 cups of air-popped popcorn for about 140 calories (NO BUTTER!! What are you thinking, it has fat!), I am now supposed to have a good-fat-friendly avocado instead (and probably only half the avocado, because I've seen calorie counts vary from 250 to 330 for a whole avocado.) Yummy, yummy.

Talk about doing a 180...

And so, this had me thinking:

* What foods have you been told to avoid in your lifetime, and how have you seen that advice change over time?

* How have your food habits changed along with life events? (Going to college, living at home vs. getting your own place, learning how to cook, etc.)

I'm also hoping to see how various nutrition advice might differ from country to country or culture to culture. For example, in college, I had a friend from Malaysia who believed eating egg yolks was poisonous after surgery.


And finally...

* What are your own diet/fitness plans for the new year?

Looking forward to an interesting read.

I remember what Wendy Bagwell said about health "advice." He said he was going for a jug of milk and his wife told him not to drink it because it would clog up his arteries. The doctor on TV said so.
Really? When I was a kid it was always "Drink your milk if you wanna grow up and be big and strong like your uncle Edgar." All I wanted was an RC cola, but no, I was supposed to drink my milk. Now I'm told it will clog up my arteries.
"Well what should I drink then?"
"Well if you want to be smart about it," she said, "You should drink a little wine to clear out your arteries."
Really? This from the woman who wouldn't have a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the house because it had the word alcohol on the label. Now she says we should drink wine.
"I can believe it," he replied. "My uncle Edgar could have a drink and clear out a whole bar."

As for what the experts say is or is not healthy, I've given up keeping track. One week eggs are good for you, the next they will kill you. You have to catch up with the latest news before you drink your coffee, to see if it's an antioxidant or a heart killer today.

When I was growing up my mother was vigilant about the evils of white sugar. It has no benefit and wears you out. It is the precursor to illness, poverty and ruin. Funny thing that... now sugar is the good guy, because we have high fructose corn syrup to watch out for. My mother is not blind to the irony of it - she mentioned it herself while reading labels on fruit jam jars.

Oh, and about the low fat craze... If the package says "low fat" you can eat as much as you want and still lose weight! Yeah. Right. The taste alone of low fat foods should be a dead (pun intended) giveaway that they are not healthy for you. Low fat foods taste sickly.

Meanwhile people in France have awesome food made with real, un-messed-with ingredients, and no obesity epidemic. This is because they have learned eating a lot of food makes a person fat. It is a lesson I hope we in the USA will one day learn.

I have determined the best thing for me to do is practice moderation. A bit of sweet, a bit of meat, a bit of starch, a bit of carbs, a bit of veggies... a bit more of veggies, yum! Not too much of anything, and not too much food total.

If you wanted to look at various groups of people in the US and see who was the longest lived, that title goes to the Seventh Day Adventists who are basically vegan. You can look up the Blue Zone Project also.

https://www.seventhdayadventistdiet.com/

Which makes sense if you think about it. In Genesis, even after the fall, those people that followed God were vegetarians right up to the point that God allowed them to be omnivores after Noah’s flood.

My church has fasting as one of our Christian disciplines.

http://www.abbamoses.com/fasting.html

Or you can identify certain particularly unhealthy categories of food and completely eliminate them from your diet: Candy, Cookies, Ice Cream, Pizza, Soft Drinks, Potatoes and White Bread.

Thanks for including the links... I'm skimming through the second one in particular.

Just out of curiosity, why is oil one of the forbidden things on fasting days? I don't mean this as a criticism at all, I've just never heard of oil as being one of the no-no's on a religious fast before (maybe the fasts I've read about just weren't strict enough?)

Had to smile at "The Marital Fast" (abstaining from sex within marriage), and the admittance that it is probably more difficult -- and more widely ignored -- than any of the fasts having to do with food.

10+ points for honesty!

I think the Bible says something about if you do that Marital Fast you shouldn't do it for too long. Somewhere in 1 Corinthians 7 I think.

Grassfed butter is healthy according to new research. Margarine is the evil one.

Cheese is good. It is better than skim milk.

Avoid hydrogenated oil at all cost. If you find it in the label, throw it away.

Cows milk is bad, specially skim milk.

Fermented food is good.

The food at this restaurant could kill you! Nothing healthy at all on the menu.

“...The bottom line is clear from the Typikon itself: days on which oil is not permitted are called "dry eating" days which means basically no fried foods, and no oil in the soups or salads. The Church Fathers knew perfectly well that fried foods tasted better than boiled ones ; that soups with oil added tasted better than soups made without oil; and that salads with oil dressings tasted better than those without.

This is exactly why olives themselves are permitted on non-oil days, while olive oil isn't; and peanuts themselves are permitted on non-oil days while peanut oil is forbidden: you can't fry anything in olives or peanuts. It is not the essence of the vegetable/fruit itself -- it is what you can do with it to make other foods taste better.”

http://www.orthodox.net/articles/fasting-and-oil.html

...and “Generally speaking, we fast from foods that give us physical strength, such as meats and dairy products and olive oil. The reason for this is to make us conscious of our dependence upon God. The Lenten fast gives us a feeling of tiredness. The purpose of this is to lead us in turn to a sense of inward brokenness and contrition; to bring us, that is, to the point where we appreciate the full force of Christ's statement, 'Without Me you can do nothing' (John 15: 5). If we always take our fill of food and drink, we easily grow over-confident in our own abilities, acquiring a false sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency. The observance of a physical fast undermines this sinful complacency. Stripping from us the specious assurance of the Pharisee - who fasted, it is true, but not in the right spirit - Lenten abstinence gives us the saving selfdissatisfaction of the Publican (Luke 18:10-13). Such is the function of the hunger and the tiredness: to make us 'poor in spirit', aware of our helplessness and of our dependence on God's aid.”

https://www.answers.com/Q/Why_do_orthodox_christians_fast_from_oil

Don’t know what the future holds but at the moment I Don’t have to worry about that one.

Soups with oil taste better than soups without? Who wrote his cookbook? Oil is completely situational and can ruin a good soup.

The purpose of fasting is to make us tired? I thought it was to deny our flesh, get it out of the way, and get closer to God. There is no benefit in being tired. It's a side effect that is endured because of the benefits of fasting.

I have theological AND gustatory issues with that logic.

The reason it isn’t doctrine by exclusion is that God very clearly states that he is modifying the dietary rules for humanity in Genesis 9:3...”Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.” So we have actual positive documentation of the change in scripture.

” we see clean animals already defined (see Gen. 2:7). But wait, it is not recorded in scripture. Doesn't matter, it was assuredly defined and passed down through oral traditions and ordinances from Adam. Common sense should tell us this. If we were meant to be strictly vegetarian, why would God require every Israelite to eat the Passover lamb? It was mandatory (see Exodus 12:43-47). [/QUOTE]

The institution of the Passover, the Passover lamb, and the Mosaic law post dated creation and the flood by thousands of years. God designed us - really all of creation - to be vegetarian. If you look forward to a millennial kingdom in which death is abolished and the lion lays down with the lamb, everything will be vegetarian again (a necessary prerequisite for the coexistence of predator and prey species, just as death is a prerequisite to maintain a non vegetarian diet).

Orthodox monks maintain a vegetarian diet today as part of their rule.

I disagree with SDA interpretation of a variety of things, but on the issue of diet they’ve figured it out (and frankly their lifespans and overall health bear testament to it).

not sure about food but its well known that alcohol is the demon drink.

I just know too many people who've died from it. And not because they were necesarily intoxicated and poisoned, but when they were intoxicated they just did STUPID things, like drive too fast. Or jump into the ocean.

If you need just one good rule of thumb to eat healthier I think it would be this:

"The poison is in the processing" so the closer the food is to something that you cut off a plant or out of an animal or get from an animal (eggs, milk, etc) the healthier it is for you. So whole milk is better than skim milk, is better than some weird chemical concoction that tries to simulate milk without any real milk in it. When I'm sort of trying to follow that advice there's lots of meat, veggies, and cheese and not so much stuff based on pulverized grains mixed with other stuff and put in a box as a food that doesn't exist in nature (pizza, pot pie, cracker, cookies, or even ice cream).

For most people that is enough direction to greatly improve their food. After that you can get into all the nuances of organic, or grass fed, or if the himylayan salt with trace minerals is really enough more beneficial for you health to justify it's higher cost over regular boring salt.

My generation was lied to plenty of times by the diet fascists..

They told us we would die if we ate eggs.. All dairy products like milk and cheese where going to kill you.. Also salt was not to be consumed or you would die..

There are still talking the same kind of talk today but it seems the vegan faction among the diet fascists are gaining more power within that evil organization and now eating any meat will kill you..

There will probably be lying health fascists from now till the return of Jesus so learn to turn off your ears when one of these gastronomy gestapo guys starts lecturing you about what you can and cannot eat..

Gastronomy gestapo... I'm gonna remember that one.

I always heard about the infamous fruitcake growing up. Tried one last year and loved it. I had 4 of them this year

to answer some other questions

well Chinese culture has a whole philosphy of food as medicine and eating that it would take me pages to try to explain to you.

suffice to say that not many foods are regarded as poison if you eat them all in balance.

Another thing is because chinese food is eaten with chopsticks and bowls, the portions are actually better suited to digestion.

You rarely see many obese Chinese people.

Japanase sumo wrestlers have another kind of diet.

woe if you follow the SAD diet (standard american diet) which is very unbalanced. Their healthy food pyramid is actually not very healthy at all. Also the way their food is grown and over processed is very bad.

I was reading this book called Hungry Planet and it showed families all around the world and what they ate over a week. The interesting thing is it actually included cigarettes as something people consume. People cigarettes is not a food. I know you put it in your mouth, but its not edible and smoking is known to kill people.

According to ancient legend (from the 1970's)... If you put an entire package of pop rocks candy in your mouth it WILL kill you.