4 Foods You Should NEVER Eat
Diets are hard.
Diets are confusing.
There is an endless stream of conflicting information and misplaced passions that seem to pull us in a million different dietary directions. In our quest to lose weight and change our body we can simplify things by following a named diet.
Should you go Keto? Paleo? Vegan?
There are ripped people who follow each of these diets and will swear it is the only way to achieve the physique of your dreams.
Before you nail down which exact diet plan you want to follow you need to first realize that there are nefarious foods that we eat every day. Foods that cause not only a bloated waistline, but societal issues across the globe. The foods below contribute to the growing health inequity on the planet.
It is a melancholy object to walk the streets in travel and see otherwise healthy people indulging in these food choices. This is A Modest Proposal on dietary integrity.
Here are FOUR FOODS YOU SHOULD NEVER EAT!
1. Your Child.
This one is controversial within the “only natural” movement. Those who claim we should only eat what comes naturally, and foods that we have evolved with. They often use arguments like “no other species of animal drinks the milk of another species, so why should we drink milk?”
They want us to follow a similar path and lifestyle to our animal brethren, completely ignoring our more complex brains and emotional capacity. They claim that things which are natural in the animal kingdom should therefore be natural with humans.
They claim that since bears, felines, prairie dogs, hamsters and rats all eat their young we should follow suit.
I am, controversially, here to tell you that this is wrong. I can’t speak on the morality of the issue but I can tell you that nutritionally it is wrong.
The developing body of your infant child provides only a quarter of the protein and fat of a fully grown human, like your husband. The child’s brain is surrounded by a larger layer of fat than a full grown human, talk about empty calories!
2. Your neighbor.
Paleo enthusiasts claim that we should only eat what the caveman ate. Meat, vegetables, eggs. Simple things like that. They always try to convince you that we must return to the pre-agrarian point in our evolution to reach our full genetic potential.
Archaeological evidence has proven that early man regularly practiced cannibalism. Bones have been found with teeth and tool marks upon them, as well as the discovery of human remains among the fossils of elk, deer and other food sources. The purpose of this cannibalism was both to meet their daily protein needs and to keep the neighboring tribe under control.
Cavemen ate other cavemen and it follows that Paleo enthusiasts should be preaching about the benefits of eating human flesh.
This is not a diet plan that any reasonable person can follow. The most important component of a diet is the ability to follow it. It would take way too much time to lay traps for your neighbors every couple of days only to have a protein source. Not to mention the fact that humans are smarter than animals, they might avoid your traps altogether. You would also run out of neighbors fairly shortly and then you would have to start an entirely new diet.
3. The Venus Fly Trap from Little Shop of Horrors.
Veganism is a growing dietary segment of the population. Many dieters attempt to go vegan for health and weight management reasons. Many hipsters attempt to go vegan for moral reasons.
They claim that meat is either immoral or bad for you, as if those two things must be directly correlated. They will only eat plants, no animal products are acceptable. Instead of eating chicken they will eat a chemical cocktail of pure gluten called seitan. Much healthier.
They want you to eat any and every plant you can find. Spinach? Sure. Brocolli? Hell yeah! Venus Fly traps that sing and helps Rick Moranis meet ladies? Ehh.
You cannot eat the Venus Fly Trap because it depends on human meat to survive, therefore it is not a vegan itself. This is unacceptable to vegans worldwide, they would never eat things that require the flesh of animals to survive. They only eat vegetables and farm raised grain that are harvested by giant combines, which routinely kill nests of rabbits and other small animals to collect the grain.
4. Lava.
Raw food enthusiasts claim you should only eat “raw” food, meaning food that is ready to go and requires no cooking or preparation other than rinsing it off. These people survive on a diet of fruits and vegetables and say you should only eat foods that come directly from the earth. Food you can pluck from a tree, pick up off the ground, dig up and eat instantly.
There is no more “raw” food than lava. It is, literally, directly from the earth. In fact it’s from the core of the earth, an area where no pollution has ever existed, It must be healthier and purer than surface fruits and vegetables which are planted in soil that could be rife with pollution. Lava is so raw that it cooks itself for you.
Lava is a bad food choice because it will melt you from the inside out, much like a Nazi searching for the Lost Ark. As I said earlier, the name of the game is sustainability, you can’t follow an eating plan that will kill you with one bite, no matter how natural it is.
As you can see all of these suggestions are ridiculous, yet use the same justifications you see for popular diets. When searching or asking for nutritional advice most of your findings will simply be propaganda. Eating is a very social and emotional aspect of the human condition, and people have very strong ties to their diet of choice. In a time when we have very little that defines us, some people find meaning in their dietary choices, and thusly are ready to defend it to the death.
There is only one truth about the human metabolism- it is incredibly adaptive. We have evolved eating whatever we could get our hands on, our bodies can function on a majority carnivorous diet, a majority vegetarian diet and an omnivorous diet. You can lose weight, gain muscle, rebuild your health or feel better eating any diet.
The most important thing needed to lose weight is not food choice, it is a caloric deficit. You can eat however many healthy, whole, vegan, paleo or raw foods as you want, but if you eat too much you will gain weight. The battle for weight loss isn’t in the food you choose, it’s in the amount of food you consume.
That being said your diet should still be built around whole, healthy foods. I eat in a very paleo-ish manner. I eat a lot of meat, vegetables and low amount of starchy carbs.
A diet is largely a game of smart sacrifice. You need to forego some of the things you enjoy, but not all of them. If you love cereal in the morning and can’t see yourself making it a month without it, you can include it but you need to first recognize that you will need to sacrifice something else, like pasta for dinner, to make up for the amount of carbohydrates in the cereal. You can make a diet plan that includes your favorite foods, but still puts you in a caloric deficit if you are smart about it.
It is a mental game you must play with yourself. You have to realize that discipline is needed to deal with the fact that you will sometimes be hungry while you are losing weight, especially in the first couple of weeks. Living in a truly prosperous society means we can eat whenever we want, that includes when we’re simply bored.
Everyone has a theory or a conviction and will try to convince you that their nutrition “advice” is spot on and all you need to develop the body you desire. Your family, your friends, your Instagram feed are all full of advice on how to eat properly, and why you should follow their little niche. Only you can find the proper way to eat for yourself, you need to experiment to find what makes you feel better, but most importantly you need to find what you can follow through on.
There are no good or bad diets, just diets that can be followed and diets that cannot be followed.