Back in 2001, when I was around 50 pounds heavier than I currently am and decided to do something about it, I took a sensible approach to eating healthy. I didn’t diet by making select foods off-limits, instead I counted calories with a reasonable daily limit, I took up cycling and I kept my fat grams per serving in the single digits. There was one other thing I did, and I know this going to sound kind of odd but I ate enough vegetables to make sure that my pooped floated in the toilet bowl after I did my business.
Earl hated that I checked, but I believe the way to healthy eating is to know your shit.
Through research and whatnot I found that cheese probably isn’t the best thing in the world to eat, especially if you’re losing weight. I’ve never been a huge cheese fan, though once in a while I like to eat a piece of sharp cheese with apple pie or in lieu of a fancy dessert when we’re dropping huge amounts of money on small amounts of food. However, I did deduce that eating cheese wasn’t very healthy and it did some funky things to one’s digestion.
Imagine my surprise today when I saw a new product from Kraft: cheese with Activia in it to help constipation. The yogurt companies have been throwing active bacteria cultures (branded Activia) into their product for years. Personally I can’t stomach the stuff since I feel like I’m eating something akin to a tapeworm but nevertheless the yogurt with ‘active cultures’ must be popular because it’s still easily found on the shelf at the grocery store. I can’t help but think that cheese with this stuff can’t be good for you. First of all, it must confuse the hell out of your body’s digestive system. I mean, think about it. You eat cheese. It stops you up like glue. And then all of the sudden the cheese starts eating it’s way from the inside out from your insides.
Now that’s more gross than checking out whether you’ve got sinkers or floaters in the toilet bowl.
Has the American diet become so whacked that we start throwing all sorts of additives into food to help our body recover from the crap we eat on a daily basis? Does anyone else find this approach to nutrition to be a little crazy? We have shaker fiber that can be mixed into anything to help things move along. We have innocent potato chips that cause explosive bowls because of the olestra used to make the stuff. And now we have cheese that has active cultures in it. What happened to just plain old moldy blue cheese?
I guess I long for the days when we knew what we were eating and it wasn’t modified to do something funky to our bodies to counteract what it was intended to do to our bodies.
