The Fringes of Nutrition
August 29th, 2004
really committed to trying raw foods. Why does this scare me?
responds to stress or uncertainty by snapping me into taking care of myself the
best I can. After giving up my journal for two months, the stress of not going
into labor the last two weeks of my pregnancy made me religious about my morning
pages again. And I was aware of this unnatural grasping for healthy habits
when, after S¿ren was born, I realized that one of the things I missed
about pregnancy was eating like every bite mattered for nurturing a life, and I
wanted to value my own life like I’d valued the life of my unborn child.
As a former smoker, I took to exercise
for the mood control I couldn’t get from cigarettes. I won’t say I’m so
spiritually evolved that my reasons for trying to take care of myself are purely
for health and not at all about my appearance, but the balance has shifted more
to recognizing that being healthy means feeling good means being happier and
happiness is good. And this is slowly conquering thinking that I’d be young
forever, that concern for health was somehow boring or unnatural or nerdy, And I
am having to overcome some preconceptions about myself as not being a physically
active person — that somehow this was polarized against being all in my head
when, in truth, good thinking has often for me accompanied long walks and
hikes.
There is some frustration, then,
figuring out what actually constitutes being healthy. The nutritional pyramid
of my elementary school nutrition education has been, it seems, pretty
thoroughly discredited as being mostly the result of powerful meat and dairy
lobbies rather than “pure” science. But I have seen three proposed replacements
and they are all different. The internet, which provides such a wealth of
different information has, as its downside, its incredible wealth of different
information (one of my favorite sites, however, is Beyond Vegetarianism,
subtitled transcending outdated dogmas). Still, if I try to find something on
foodsources for zinc, I am as likely to stumble across research paid for by the
cattlemen of America’s Beef Council on how the body doesn’t absorb zinc from
plant sources as well.
I am overwhelmed
at the number of diet books claiming to give you health for life with mutually
exclusive systems of focus. Being married to a vegan means that the food in our
house is already slightly different from a standard American diet. When I got
pregnant with S¿ren I focused on counting grams of protein in my meals in
accordance with the Brewer diet and the Bradley class nutrition information,
especially knowing that I was prone to high blood pressure in pregnancy. I was
frustrated that my previous experiences with obstetricians hadn’t included
nutritional counseling or evaluation of my diet, that they would cluck tongues
at my weight gain and give me bed rest for the blood pressure without telling me
what to eat. And while my blood pressure never got alarmingly high, S¿ren
was born weighing 10 lbs, 3 ozs, so when I got pregnant with Rainer, I focussed
not just on eating enough protein but on the glycemic index of all of the food I
was eating. The whole picture of any food seems so multi-dimensional that it is
easy to choose only one aspect of a food as a criterion for deciding to eat it
or not — the number of carbs, the glycemic index, the protein, the
fat.
