Scary

Apologies to my best girlfriend, who got a lot of this in an email.

I recently attended a conference for continuing education for massage. Because the body is a vast array of interconnected and interdependent systems, there is a broad menu of topics available to maintain our professional status and license. Also, in my case, this satisfies my recently discovered need to be a student in the more traditional, structured sense. But that's another blog.

How often do you learn something you already new, but suddenly it seems so much more sinister when you learn a new little something else?

I learned all kinds of really fascinating stuff about nutrition in my first class, for example, that the worst foods you can eat are white sugar, white flour, and white potatoes. That a can of soda is actually worse for you than a cigarette. The amount of sugar in that soda (10 tsp) can reinforce inflammation/pain up to 4 weeks, and the phosphates used to keep the sugar suspended in the water leach calcium from your system. But wait, Nutrasweet is almost as bad (we knew this) because the body metabolizes it into methanol and formaldehyde. Fun! I could go on for days about hydrogenated oil, which is still prevalent in so many processed foods. My favorite thing is about how the body will use the molecules to build cell walls, and in the process creates a plastic-like substance. It's like the plastinated human bodies in the museum exhibits, only we're still alive! Use butter!! Your body needs real, natural fats to function properly and build healthy cellular structures. Most other dairy is bad, too.

And those over-rich gargantuan oil companies look like Willy Wonka next to Frito-Lay and General Foods, and the other companies that over process our foods and keep us addicted to things we were never meant to ingest. A co-worker/friend is allergic to sunflower and corn. Do you have any idea how many things are made with both those products? Pick anything sweet at random; it probably has corn syrup in it. Baked? Probably with corn oil. Fried? Ugh. No one should be eating any processed fried foods, thanks to those hydrogenated oils mentioned above; even so, it was probably fried in corn oil. He found out that if "spices" is listed in ingredients, it probably has sunflower. Sunflower oil is in many moisturizers. He also has problems with poppyseed and celery, also both "spices".

Google "water bottles" and "bisphenol A" for more fun information.

People are so trained that it is almost impossible to deviate from the menu anywhere but home. I can barely stand to walk into a typical chain restaurant because I know I will have to have a lengthy conversation with the server about not wanting the two sides, the fries, the rice, the cole slaw (just ick generally). And then to see 2-3 servings of food on my plate alone!! Then there are food servers who routinely either do not listen, or do not get the message across to food preparers: two folks I know have sent food back recently when specified ingredients were not left off (poppyseed in one case, and meat in another case, where my friend is a vegetarian).

Yeah, yeah, I hear you: stay at home. Eat your own food. Save your money. I would like to do that, but it's not always possible. Change for the public good has to come from the public in this case, and we all have to look at what we eat and speak up.


Surreal moment

Listening to NPR Saturday, and Scott Simon is speaking with Patricia Clarkson, who is starring in a new independent film--Married Life--with Chris Cooper and Pierce Brosnan. She says she wanted to do the film not only because of these two actors, but also because of the writer and director, Ira Sachs. Ira Sachs? I went to school with Ira, and he was a writer on the newspaper staff when I was the editor (co- with Laura Scholes), then became editor after we graduated. Ira, who would make his cursive "m" with three humps, and I always teased him. Cool, Ira. Very cool.