I just finished reading the book “Diet Cults”.
I mostly hated it, especially when he is elaborating on his non-cult cult’s rules… ugh.
What is most striking in all the diet-cults, to me, is their ignorance of the fact that food, unless it is prepared in a tasty, mouth-watering way, isn’t nourishing for most people.
I had two health calls in the past two days, and both people ate in a cultish way, for health. What they shared are these:
- Their essential nutrients were not fully supplied to the body, even though the foods they ate had them.
- They ate according to someone’s idea of healthy eating.
- Both had a family member with serious health issues.
I came away from both calls with the same feeling: unless I teach them how to cook delicious meals with the few ingredients that agree with them, they will not get better.
And even more important: they won’t get happier.
Humans do best with cooked foods, and they do best with food that is made delicious.
The way some cultures cook is tasteless… boiled, thrown together.
What happens if and when the food is not tasty enough?
The same thing that is happening in France right now: they started to cook and eat like Americans, and they are getting fat… and soon we’ll hear of heart attacks, and cancers, and diabetes in a country where the numbers, while they cooked traditionally, weren’t high.
Same in Hungary… I remember when it all turned… because I am old enough.
When my mother started to buy oil instead of cooking with chicken and goose fat. Someone suggested that oil was healthier…
And everything went downhill from there: because oils are not only NOT healthier, they are actually deadly. But for the purposes of this article, they have one other contribution to the worsening health: they make the best dishes taste like crap… because the spices don’t dissolve in oil.
So what did the country that started it all? They created those horrid sauces, those horrid ketchup, those horrid concentrated tragedies of explosive taste… because what they put it on tastes bad or bland.
You need to salivate before you eat for the food to become nourishment.
The smell, the look of the food, the taste of the food need to make your salivary glands to give the message to your innards… so your innards know what is coming.
As a result, in the stomach you’ll have either acidic conditions, if what’s coming is protein, or alkaline, if what is coming is starchy.
If you don’t salivate, if you don’t chew, and if you eat the standard American fare, your stomach doesn’t know… and as a result it will
- not receive the food well… it will cramp and protest
- it will make the wrong ph… because guessing is as good as 50% wrong
- it will be forced to dump the whole undigested mass into the intestines, where the “good food” will rot, make rot bacteria flourish, and make you feel hungrier (to feed the bad bacteria) an rotten… because who can feel well with rotting stuff in their body?
Indigestion and the bad breath it gives you, is just the tip of the iceberg… you continue to crave… sex, war, speed, alcohol, smoke… whatever your favorite cravings do… while your body neatly stores the toxins in fat… because it can’t get rid of it.
All because you didn’t salivate. Because your stomach didn’t know what was coming. Because the food was only food in your mind, not in reality… because it didn’t talk to your body through your senses, sight, smell, or taste…
Surprisingly it is not difficult to make food tasty… it is all in the basic moves that can learn in a few lessons.
I remember when I was 18, I was a maid in a British household… I cooked a few times, they asked me to… but observed how they cooked…
And this way I actually know the no-no’s that bad cooking does…
Nature gave us garlic and onions, in most cultures, to make food flavorful.
Countries that cook well know
- don’t salt the onions or the garlic, because they need to not leak water into the fat!
- don’t cover the dish while you saute the onions… for the same reason.
- don’t use oil… use butter, chicken fat, lard, but don’t use vegetable ois… not even olive oil… there is no marriage possible between vegetable oil and the taste and smell goodness of
Sauteed onions.
Boiled onion is horrid… vegetable oil sauteed onion is horrid… ugh.
If you learn just one thing: how to saute onions for your dish, you’ll immediately increase the enjoyment value of your dish, and salivate, and slim down, and get your nutrients from your food.
There are more moves, but not many.
I’ll try to find an online course to teach you, or if I must, I’ll teach you myself. It is that important.
As long as you eat with your mind, you won’t be well. Guaranteed.
Consider this: if you have to put any sauce, any spice mix, any condiment on your food: then it is NOT well made.
Your Chinese, your bbq, your chips/French fries, your hamburger, your sandwiches… if it is not good without mayonnaise, or ketchup, or even oil and vinegar… then it is not tasty…
Your salads don’t nourish you. Your raw vegetables don’t nourish you. Your food needs to be lovely without anything added at the table or while cooking, from a bottle.
Your pizza sauce, your tomato sauce, your Indian simmering sauce… all design to cover up that the food is bad for you and that it is tasteless.
Learn to cook. Just the basics… it is easy… albeit it is precise… Because the Anna Karenina principle ((Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.)) applies here too: all good food are made with methods that are alike: every bad or tasteless dish is tasteless or used bad methods in its own way.
Read the original article: Diet cults vs. how life intends that you eat