The Health Question

We often ask ourselves, "why bother?". Why bother eating healthy if I'm going to hate every meal, constantly yearn for something more and only net myself an extra 2 - 5 years of life, if that. After all, aren't 60 to 70 years of good meals preferable to 62 - 75 years of blah meals? Even though I still struggle with implementing the change, I can offer you two very good reasons for attempting to do so. The first is your children, those you have now or those you may someday have, especially the ones you may someday have. The second is that everything you've been told about eating healthy is a lie.

First, the lie. Eating healthy, truly eating healthy, does require more effort and requires that you be intentional about what you eat. However, what is healthy is vastly different from what we are told is healthy. All those "diet foods" in the stores. All those programs about calories. They're wrong. I'm not going to go into the full explanation right now, it's too long and irrelevant to the current point (though fascinating and important in its own right). However, the gist of it is that true healthy eating requires eating only real food, eliminating vegetable oils from your diet along with processed sugars and eliminating or heavily restricting bread products. Included in real food is full fat butter, raw milk (from grass fed cows only, grain fed raw milk really is dangerous), full fat meat from grass fed animals and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables (more vegetables than fruit). If you do that, based on the people I've seen that are actually doing these things, you can probably expect to live an extra 15 to 20 years (maybe minimum) and your aging will be slower, meaning you'll actually be able to enjoy those extra years rather than getting 15 to 20 more years of bed ridden joint pain and feebleminded affliction.

Second, your children. Despite being second in this list, as anyone with children will probably tell you, their children come first, never second. In a book I read recently and in another I am currently reading the authors explain that while health is flexible to a point, your starting level of health, and maximum level of health, are dependent on how healthy your parents were at the time you were conceived and all the way through the breastfeeding months of your life. Because of this, because how healthy you are when you conceive a child affects how healthy that child can become, it is vitally important that you seek to be the healthiest possible version of yourself. And this applies to both the mother and father because you both contribute to the genetic code of your child. After you're done having children, if you are willing to accept the downside to not eating healthy, then you're not hurting anyone but yourself. Except . . .

. . . once you have children (or if you already have children), then they pick up the eating habits that you raise them with. This is itself important for an additional two reasons. First, while they are growing, it is important for them to get the nutrients they need to continue to grow and develop bone strength and neural pathways etc. If you're not eating healthy (as described above) then hormones are blocked by the toxins you are ingesting, as are most of the nutrients that you are attempting to consume, meaning your child's brain, bones and other tissues will not develop the way they should/as well as they could. This also leaves them less defended vs. a variety of viruses, fungi and bacteria. Secondly, if they don't develop healthy eating habits at home with you before they are adults, then they will have just as difficult a time as you did trying to eat healthy, and if they aren't healthy, then all the poor health you possessed will be compounded with the poor health they possess and passed on to THEIR children, further reducing your grandchildren's starting and max health. And it continues to cascade from one generation to the next.

So, next time you debate about whether to eat healthy, consider what it means for your children and grandchildren. And what you yourself could possibly get out of eating truly healthy.