Where I've Been

Hey y'all! I realize it has been a long time since I last posted here. I'm back, and many things have happened in my life in the meantime:

finished an internship in the Netherlands (and fell in love with Holland)

completed my first of year of nutrition training at Johnson & Wales

switched jobs from a shoe store to a bakery

adopted a plot with Mike at the local community garden and are trying to figure out plants as we go

completed a volunteer project with children at an after school program in Rehoboth over the past 5 months teaching healthy cooking classes. Or what I might call "Cooking with Kids: a Crash Course in Patience and Concentration."

And very recently something has else has happened and it is very serious. At least it is to me. I've been reading things and researching and I've found a lot of information that I cant stop thinking or talking about (sorry Mike.). I have come in to a wealth of nutrition ideas that contradict everything that I have learned in my standard, first-step-in-becoming-a-Registered-Dietitian education. I have been learning and reading about what I can only think to call a Traditional, Real Foods way of eating. One that focuses on the idea that high quality animal protein (grass-fed, sustainably raised, wild, etc) should make up the bulk of your diet, that fats don't make you fat. One that says your diet should NOT consist of 45-65% grain and starchy carbohydrate as the Food Pyramid/USDA/American Dietetic Association (ADA) recommends. One that eliminates all things processed, artificially manufactured, full of sugar. That recommends fermented foods and organ meats(!) and rendered animal fats(!!!). That says cholesterol is a good thing! Crazy, I know. If you had asked me 6 months ago if I would recommend a diet low in carb, high in fat, high in animal protein or any of this stuff I would have replied, in a word, "No." But with all of the things I am learning, my answer is much less clear now.

If you know me, you know that the main reason I ever got started working towards a degree in both culinary arts and nutrition is because I wanted to have a career helping people treat chronic illness and disease with preventative nutrition as opposed to Western medicine. I believe that humans can exist, be healthy, thrive, and avoid physical ailments if they are eating the right foods. I also believe that when a person is eating right, that it will naturally fall in line with what is right and healthy for the Earth. It is with this belief that I began my path to becoming a dietitian and have loved every step. Learning about nutrients, phytochemicals, minerals, anatomy, biology, everything. It is also with this belief that I began reading books like Diet for a New America, Living Foods for Optimum Health, and others that advocated a plant and grain based diet. These books endorsed the idea that a vegetarian diet would be a healthy one for both humans and the environment: eat the grain instead of eating the cow that eats the grain, awesome! I ate tofu, I drank soy milk. I ebbed and flowed through veganism and vegetarianism because I thought it was the right approach to holistic health. After taking a vegetarian cooking course at school and learning about the incredible impact that eating commercially raised meats (and big agriculture) has on the environment (desertification of South America, a dead zone due to pesticide runoff in the Gulf of Mexico, for example) I began to associate animal consumption with environmental ruin. This on top of what I thought I knew about how all of Western disease (Diabetes, Heart Disease, Obesity, etc) being the product of our over consumption of meat and protein. Meat was not good for people, not good for the Earth.

I realize now and I am very sure of this: there is not an inherent connection between eating meat and negative effects on the the environment. There is also an important distinction to be made in all of this regarding eating meat and your health: all animal products are not equal. There is a quality issue and by this I mean that the way an animal is raised makes a difference nutritionally. There is in fact a big difference between a piece of meat from a cow that was allowed to move, exposed to sunshine, given the chance to eat what its ruminant digestive tract was designed to eat (grass), wasn't forced to live in a compact, stressful, unsanitary situation and the meat from a cow that was raised on a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) where the worst possible conditions exist. Studies showing the correlation between animal protein consumption and various types of cancer, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, heart disease fail to make this distinction. The information about dairy that lead me to believe that humans shouldn't drink animal milk was most likely about milk that had been pasteurized- not raw milk which advocates of a Real Foods Lifestyle are strongly in favor of. Now I've yet to try raw milk (something I'm really looking forward to) because accessibility is tricky here in Rhode Island so I'll have to wait and see about that for myself soon- more on that later.

What I'm getting at is this: I'm sort of changing my mind about everything I thought I knew about nutrition. I'm reorganizing my thoughts about meat consumption and the diseases of affluence, and the destruction of the environment. I'm learning that when raised properly, meat is good for people and good for the Earth. I'm in the process of absorbing a lot of new information and planning to use this space as a way to sort things out (for mine and Mike's sake) and I welcome any input you might have along the way. I'm really very excited, because I haven't been this inspired for a while. I think I feel so excited because a lot of this information I'm finding feels so intuitive, and I can't wait to know more- from experience. I still have A LOT of questions (ketoacidosis, anyone!) but like I said, I'm keeping my mind open.