Poison

I’ve had an apostrophe.  (I think you mean an epiphany.)

Follow this.

One our first day of life, we are growing.  Chemicals are reacting, organs are building, bones are growing, its all growing and building.  Our genetics directs it how to build in the finer details but the basic structure of how it all goes together is the same.  One heart, two lungs, a liver, two kidneys, brain, etc.  Sure cells die, but the growth rate far exceeds that and the death of cells is part of the growing and renewal process.

One our last day of life, everything is dying.  Organs are shutting down, hormones that directed growth have long since stopped flowing, cellular decay has exceeded cellular growth, and those delicately balanced chemical equilibria have shifter far to one side for the very last time.

Somewhere in between the first day and the last day, there’s a shift, an inflection point if you will, where we crossover and the growing stops outpacing the dying.  One unconfirmed source told me once that this point is near the age of 27, but we don’t “feel” it until we are 35.  Admittedly, this source is not so reliable and may have smoked an excessive amount of pot.  However, I do know there does exist an inflection point and, besides, the exact position is inconsequential to my point.

Skip to Cub Scout analogy.

The biggest event in Cub Scouts is the pinewood derby.  Kids build little wooden cars from kits and then race them to see whose is fastest.  Realistically, Cub Scout Dads build alot of pinewood derby cars.  Again, this is inconsequential to my point.

The race track comprises a steeply inclined starting ramp coupled to a long, flat straight-away heading to the finish line.  The trick to the race is that all of the speed your car will have is attained during the acceleration down the ramp.  After that, its just coasting on the momentum from the ramp.  Serious car builders know that if they want to win, they have to design the car to achieve maximum speed on the ramp, which is most often done by moving the center of gravity as far back on the car as possible, so that the car is accelerating for the longest time possible.  After the center of gravity passes the…dum dum duummmmm…inflection point between the ramp and straight-away, the car stops accelerating and just coasts (and slows) to the finish.

I hope the light bulb has just turned on.

All the growing and building that our bodies due before that inflection point (e.g. age 27) builds the base structure on which we have to coast for the rest of our lives.  We are building the heart, the lungs, the metabolism, the muscles (huh?), the BRAIN, all of it, that will be used to sustain us as we coast to the last day.

There’s something wrong here.  I know I worked out and built muscle after age 27.  I know I am stronger than I was then.  How can this all be true?  Easy.  The base of muscle health you attain before (for example) age 27 forms the basis for the muscle for the rest of your life.  That isn’t to say that you will not build muscle later, in fact, given a good base, you can build tremendous muscle, but it must come from properly formed tissues (and possibly the right enzyme structure) when you are younger.

There are chemical reactions and developments in our bodies that we have no idea even exist.  Its a machine of such enormous complexity that vitamins and the USRDA merely scratch the surface of what is needed to build a proper body.  You can be certain that it will take more than a multivitamin and fiber to grow properly.

So what does this mean?  Well, it means that eating gunk as a child and through college ensures that your bones and muscles are not going to be at their full potential.  Even though you can burn up 10,000 calories a day when you are 17, your metabolism is not the only function of your body that needs correct building materials.    This is not to say you will not grow a heart because you ate potato chips, but it may mean that the cells in your heart that direct its formation, growth, strength, and structure may not be as numerous or as long lived as they could be.  Something (hormones, other cells) tells it to grow, but after you hit 27, that message stops being sent and you have to live with whatever you have grown up to that point.

You aren’t doomed.  But if you did not take care of your body at a young age, you will likely not live as long or as healthy a life as you could have.  This I am sure of.  You can’t build speed up again after the inflection point.  It won’t happen.  You can minimize the drag on your momentum by getting back into shape and eating better, but you won’t regain the momentum lost before age 27.   Its not “you are what you eat”, its”you are what you ate“.

What about people who quit smoking or lose weight an are much healthier because of it?  They definately are more healthy.  But If there had never smoked or gained the weight in the first place, they would have been much better off than that.

Think of the children.

The young children of this country (as other places in the world too) are in serious danger.   The poison we feed into our children daily is killing them.  They don’t feel it, we don’t feel it, but its killing them.  The worst part is that we are almost powerless to stop it.

We talk about the obesity epidemic but that is merely a symptom of a more insidious danger (just wait for it).  When you see an obese 8 year old who is so heavy he can’t run, you are seeing a child with the symptoms of poisoning.  We think of being fat as of eating too much, but that is only true for eating normal food.  Real food.  Our bodies were made to store food, and we do it well.  But when we feed our bodies something strangely unnatural, our bodies cannot cope.  They totally freak out.  In the cases of obesity in this country, it is not caused by eating too much as it is caused by eating poison.

Your tongue (and nose) is the gatekeeper for your stomach.  Bad tasting things are ejected and good tasting things are eaten.  That’s because bad tasting things (like rotten meat and animal poop) are dangerous and your body cannot eat them safely.  Likewise, good tasting things (cooked meat, fruit) are good for you and your body knows how to process them.

But what does your body do with trans fats?  Or high fructose corn syrup?

Your tongue wasn’t designed to handle this stuff.  That poison wasn’t around when your tongue was invented.  It tastes good, so the tongue says “OK”.  And then the danger begins.  Your gatekeeper can no longer distinguish between safe and unsafe food.  And suddenly, your body is left defenseless.  Its almost as if you had no sense of taste/smell at all.  Imagine if you could not tell by taste or smell if the chicken you were cooking was rotten?  You would have to rely on packaging dates.  But what if there were NO warnings.  In fact, what if rotten chicken were incredibly cheap and your could feed your whole family for $15 from a drive through window with rotten chicken?  You’d be eating it every day.  Until you puked.

But what if you never puked?  What if, like high fructose corn syrup, it tasted good and then made you consume even more calories because it shut off your body’s ability to determine blood glucose levels?  What if, like high fructose corn syrup, it didn’t even change blood glucose levels and your ate 3 times the number of calories you needed and so did your kids and they ballooned to mammoth size and every pointed at them and said they ate too much and you cut back their “food” and they screamed because they were starving?  All because they ate a POISON that their bodies cannot handle.  Because it was cheap and easy and convenient.

This is the insidious infiltration of poisonous food into our lives today.  Entire megalithic industries have been built around cheap “food” that you can easily purchase and that tastes good.  I mean isn’t that what we all want?  Think about it.  We have structured our lives around the ease of that convenience.   We can buy a bigger house because both spouses can work.  We can have incredibly jam packed lives for our children with soccer, baseball, ballet, scouts, hockey, etc, etc., etc. and still get food on the table or in the car quickly because we can buy very cheap “food” and the kids will not complain about it.  We can take all that time spent preparing REAL food and spend it driving hither and yon to every every we can possible squeeze into one day, and work long enough to make that jumbo mortgage payment and the car payment on the both SUV’s.  We structure our entire lives so that not only is cheap poisonous food more convenient, its a vital necessity.  You can’t give it up.  Even if you want to.

Worse than that, they won’t let you give it up.  The industries built around a society dependent on cheap, fast, easily accessible food do not want you to give it up.  If you had a company that sold cookies, would you want the country to stop buying 10,000,000,000 cookies a year from you?  I wouldn’t.  They don’t either.  The advertisements bombarded at you and your children daily shows you the level of desperation that they have.  Look in the stores.  When are the cookies and crackers?  In the cereal aisle.  When I was in Michigan, Kroger reorganized all its stores so that the candy aisle was in the same aisle as the cereal aisle.  As parents go buy cereal (one of the most frequently purchased items) the children scream for the candy.  And the sugary children’s cereal is right at shopping cart level.

You buy the candy.  You buy the corn syrup.  You buy the transfat.  You feed it to the children.   And their poor growing organs screaming for clean protein have no idea what to do with corn syrup and food coloring.

And how fast is the inflection point approaching for your child?  Are they 8?  15?  25?  Think about what is going into their mouths.  What is building their momentum right now?  How far will they coast in life before they run out of steam?  My son is 10.  I worry about the pressure on him to eat the gunk his friends eat.  I see their bodies already looking unhealthy.  At 10.  Ten year olds should not look like they do.  They should have vibrant looking skin, shining eyes, and move like the wind.  The slow, dull-witted children can quote TV in their sleep but somehow clam up into a blank 1000-yard stare when you ask “Look at that fossil, how do think it got there?”  They can’t think and they can’t move.  Its scary.

The poisonous food is not my main point.  You can watch “Supersize Me” and get better information.  My main point is this:

The choices we make right now, this minute, for what we feed our kids, will change their lives forever.  The muscles and tissues and cell construction in their organs, and skin, and bones, and brains are being formed as the basis for how they will function after age 27.  After the inflection point, after which they will coast. Pouring good tasting poison like high fructose corn syrup, trans fat, saturated fat, and sugar-coated multicolored starch balls into their bodies will build nothing but a weak infrastructure.  They bodies were never meant to process that stuff.  It may not kill them right now, for the body is a wondrously adaptive machine, but when it is spending time adapting to processing poison it is not building the hearts and livers and intestinal systems that will survive long term.

Think about the analogy of the car on the track.  We all grow, we all die.  And somewhere in the middle, we stop doing one and start doing the other.  The basis for your longevity and quality of life is built while you are on the ramp.  After the inflection point, you will only coast to the finish.  On whatever you built beforehand.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Childish Rants, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.