Is Ignorance Bliss?
That Nice Boy I Married and I were invited to a small cookout Saturday night. Had a very nice time -- good food, good company, lovely evening for sitting out. Well, it kind of sucked that while everyone else was drinking wine, I was sucking down a whole 2 liter bottle of club soda. But other than that, a really great time.
The hostess voiced her trepidation at cooking for me, since I'm a cookbook author and all. I told her I was sure the food would be great, and it was. However, she was a little concerned that I didn't eat the grain dish or the dessert. (I stuffed myself on perfectly-barbecued chicken and a terrific salad of local organic vegetables with toasted walnuts, which was wonderful.)
At one point she asked me, "Do you sometimes feel like you know too much?" I was puzzled at the question, and asked her what she meant. She clarified that maybe if I didn't know so much about nutrition I could just relax and enjoy what everyone else was eating.
I said no, I didn't think I knew too much; indeed, I think I still know too little. I'm a feel-good junkie, I explained, and anything that can make me feel healthier is something I want to do.
I explained to her that it really and truly doesn't bother me to pass up high-carb foods. I know that many people feel a pang when these things are served, but I truly don't. That pang is a mental conversation that goes something like this: "Oooh, that looks good! But it's not on my diet. But it would taste soooo good! But I really shouldn't..." It's a battle.
My brain doesn't work like that. I never get to the "Oooh, that looks good" part. My brain doesn't even consider it. It skips right over any thought of how the dish would taste, and goes straight to "If I eat that, I'm going to feel wretched in 90 minutes, and my pants won't fit in the morning." Truly, I don't want to eat concentrated carbs.
I find the attitude of "You know too much" curious. It seems to ignore, or at the very least greatly minimize, the health effects of nutrition. (I do not mean to dog on my hostess, by the way. The grain dish she served was made with brown and wild rice, the dessert was fresh homemade peach cobbler. As concentrated carb foods go, they were darned good. But they were still concentrated carbs.) Just as I have a disconnect in my brain for "Oooh, that would taste good," most folks have a disconnect in their brains for "That will make me feel wretched." And of course, for some folks it doesn't make them feel wretched right away, and some not at all. But my observation is that a high percentage of the population has health complaints that come from nutritional habits, and they never make the connection in their heads.
Most folks don't want to make that connection. If they realized that their fatigue, or their headaches, or their mood swings, or whatever, were nutritionally caused, or at the very least, exacerbated by their food choices, they'd feel like they had to change how they eat. And they don't want to. Most people would quite literally rather die than change they way they eat; they do it every day.
That's their right. But it's an attitude that is opaque to me; I confess I don't understand it. I have zero patience for being less than bloomingly, energetically well. (I have to tell you, if I found out that shaving my head would eliminate this stupid Lyme disease, I'd be bald by sundown.)
In light of that total intolerance of ill- or even marginal-health, the idea of knowing too much simply does not compute.
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high-carb substances are not food
I see a hamburger bun as no different from the paper wrapper. I don't eat the wrapper, either.
If you define food as something that nourishes you, those things that are bad for your health are not food.
If I took a chunk of sewerage and disguised it, and made it genuinely taste and smell good, but you knew what it was, would you eat it? If you saw somebody else eating it, would you feel envious? In what way are high carb foods different? If you know what they really are, how can you be tempted by them, no matter how good they taste?
I was surprised how easily things I had loved all my life became non-food items - sourdough bread, pasta, rice, pizza, mashed potatoes, steak fries, orange juice. As much as I might like the taste/texture/smell of some of these, I think of them now as Trojan Horses that want to sneak bad stuff into my body and ruin my health.
If you can reclassify carby foods this way, you can easily sit in a long meeting beside a tray of doughnuts and pastries and not feel the slightest temptation, even if you are hungry. I'm about as likely to eat a paper clip.
People who continue to do unhealthy things, and know exactly what they're doing, must have a self-destructive urge. I really, truly want to avoid diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, stroke, etc. I hope to spend my older years fit and healthy and alert, rather than lying on my back stuck full of tubes. How can anyone not be willing to make small sacrifices towards that goal?
It does annoy me when people are hurt or insulted when I ignore carby treats and snacks.
I do feel that I know too much
Especially since reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan and "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver.
It's not only nutrition, but also the whole cacaphony of how we obtain our food, the giant convoluted and unsustainable complex of agribusiness that rings in my ears every time I sit down to eat.
It's not enough that the food is organic, it has to be local (and therefore, in season.) (Which in Washington at this time of year is a bit frustrating, since with the cold and the rain we've had this year, A LOT of stuff isn't at the farmer's market yet.)
It's not enough to buy "free-range" chicken when you find out that those chickens only have access to the outdoors for the last few days of their lives. (By this time they are so conditioned to being inside that the "range," [about as big as a dog run,] holds no appeal for them.)
It has to be really grass-fed beef, not grass-fed and feedlot finished.
It has to be really good dairy, not some sham like Horizon.
It's difficult and expensive, being a low-carb eater with this kind of stuff in my head. Going to someone else's house to eat means willfully tuning out the voices to some extent, because very few of the people I know have the inclination to buy and eat all that conscientiously.
Love your blog, Dana! On the
Love your blog, Dana!
On the topic of knowing too much, I'm reading Gary Taubes Good Calorie, Bad Calorie book, and it's blowing me away.
The lack of science for high carb/low fat, the facts behind the low carb lifestyle.... Thank goodness he carried on after the NYT article.
Just amazing (and shocking) stuff on how the low fat myth came to be. Definitely a case of it being a good thing knowing all this, I think.
Is ignorance bliss?
This past week I went home to visit family and the way my family worries over what I eat, you'd think eating low carb was something totally alien. We had salmon, broccoli and salad for dinner one evening (all perfectly delicious and perfectly fine for me to eat). My Mom kept asking what else I needed - "Nothing Mom, this is really great!" I never did convince her that what she had made was perfect and I wasn't missing anything.
I too feel awful if I eat what I shouldn't. I discovered low carb after gaining wieght for years and reacting badly to a diabetic diet that was too high carbohydrates for me. Now as long as I stay around 20 carbs a day, I'm good to go. Knowing that 30 minutes after I eat something I shouldn't, I'm going to start shaking and then have a blinding headache for five hours goes a very long way to keep me on track!
What gets me is the people who will not tell the truth about what is in food because they think if I don't know, it won't matter. WRONG! That attitude is even worse than "ignorance is bliss" - it's "I can trick you into eating what I want you to eat and you'll never know because all this stuff is just made up anyway and I don't believe it's real". I have become very good at being a detective on what people are serving and not letting them guilt me into eating something I shouldn't. After all, I'm the one who has to live with the results of anything I eat.
People who slip you carbs
Those people would become ex-friends very quickly, especially were I diabetic -- they're threatening your health. And if it were a family member, one little incident like this would be enough to insure that we never had a meal at their home again, not even for a holiday. Yes, I would refuse to go to a relative's house for Thanksgiving or Christmas if they had pulled this little trick on me. Family ties don't extend to allowing this sort of abuse.