Everywhere I go, people want to talk about what they have learned about what really makes us unhealthy and fat. Just yesterday, at the fireplace & BBQ store, another long talk about ensued when one of the salespeople was asking me how I liked my new Weber Genesis they delivered to me a few weeks ago. This gentleman was a big Meat grilling guy, and as our conversation evolved, he said his Doc told him it was the carbs and sugars and processed foods that were making him fat and destroying his energy. His doc told him to keep grilling and searing his meat and give up a majority of his carb-rich addictions. Yeah! He did and he lost a lot of weight.
Almost every day, I manage to get in some conversation with some stranger – even the guy cooking up free samples at Trader Joes – about what to eat, why, and how the diet landscape is drastically changing, thanks to the fact the the food pyramid lies are finally being toppled. No one topic, I find, is so dominating, so intriguing, and so inviting as “What should I eat, and why?” Not the wars, the economy, the presidential race, or the heat wave. Everyone wants to talk about that which they see and hear in the media, nowadays, that goes against the government-medical establishment health and (un)wellness paradigm. People are intrigued by all of the new information (new to them) that they are seeing in the media. Amazingly, the American media has been consistently reporting on the cholesterol-fat myth for a food two years now, and before that, the UK media was writing about these topics as far back as 2004. The SAD (Standard American Diet) has finally come into question, and the news is saturated with a zillion reports questioning how/why our society began to demonize what our grandparents ate while we quickly jumped on board the Grains & Sugar & Soy & Processed Foods train that led Americans down the path of obesity and chronic disease.
NPR is one outlet that has been running a lot of food politics and food truthism stories. Most recently, they interviewed John Durant, the ex-Michigander turned New Yorker caveman, about meat eating. Here is a previous story on NPR: “The Paleo Diet Moves From the Gym to the Doctor’s Office.”
Interestingly, NPR just ran a story on how the Chinese women’s Olympic volleyball team went into a slump because the team hadn’t been eating meat in three weeks due to the fact that they were on the road and did not have access to the specially sourced meat they usually eat at their training base.
That said, poor Ted Danson and Bill Clinton are certainly … having a cow at the thought of all this meat talk and meat eating.
