This is my second post of the day, I was not planning another entry today but I had to share the experience that I had at my local grocery store today. It spoke volumes to me in terms of where our society is when it comes to healthy eating.
As part of my weekend routine, I typically plan my meals for the week either on Saturday or Sunday(we will discuss pre-planning your meals at a later blog post) and by Sunday afternoon I head out to the the grocery store to purchase my weeks’ staples. This week my menu included homemade oatmeal muffins for breakfast, grilled herbed red snapper on a bed of mixed greens for lunch and mixed vegetable/lentil soup for dinner. My snacks for the week will include carrots and greek yogurt. Sounds delicious, right?! My shopping list included kale, spinach, celery, carrots, lentil beans, frozen wild caught red snapper, sweet potatoes, garlic and onions. While shopping I decided since I was making oatmeal breakfast muffins, that I would also make homemade oatmeal cookies as my go to sweet snack, thus I grabbed Ghirardelli bitter sweet dark chocolate chips and walnuts, Yum!
I made way to the cash registrar with my goods and half way through the transaction, the cashier said to me, “everything here is so healthy, why not balance it out with some cookies.” Balance with cookies, really? He proceeded to offer me oatmeal cookies fresh from their bakery that he said were on sale.
I told the cashier that I was planning on my making my own oatmeal cookies without all the added additives, extra fat and extra sugar. He honestly looked perplexed.
The point of this blog wasn’t to share with you what my meals for the week would be. The point here is that the cashier felt that my style of healthy eating was somehow strange. The fact that my cart wasn’t full of foods packed in a box, plastic bag or can was atypical. Eating processed foods full of additives, preservatives, trans fats and excess sugar seems to be the norm. Where did we go wrong in this society to think that eating healthy is a foreign concept?
Eating nutrient dense foods will enrich and prolong our lives. Unhealthy eating takes years from our lives when we become plagued with disease and illness. It’s time to change our mindset, let’s start eating to live, instead of living to eat.
by Marjorie Binette, MD