The Latest Eating Disorder
by tristero
Eating for health can make you sick. It’s helpful to read Jordan’s original post to see how crazy it got for her.
Eating specifically for nutrition strikes me personally as both puritanical and a fools errand. It’s puritanical because eating should be about pleasure, not a demonstration of moral virtue like “you should live a healthy life,” something Jordan has learned the hard way. As for the actual value of “eating for health,” from what I’ve read, the nutrients in food and their interactions are not well understood even by experts. For a layperson like myself, it is absolutely impossible to remember, let alone follow, most of the recommendations, which, anyway, are often contradictory. Instead, simply eating a highly varied diet of real, delicious home-prepared food seems automatically to take care of my “nutrient balance” – whatever the hell that means. (Treats – edibles high in sugar and/or processed with unpronounceable ingredients – are not really “food,” at least as I see it.)
I suspect it’s likely that Michael Pollan’s famous motto – Eat food, not too much. Mostly plants – is about all most of us need to know unless you have specific diet-related health problems. Food should be served and enjoyed, not prescribed and endured.
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