After traversing the globe this week (or so it feels) on an extended visit to see family and friends, it is very good to be home, even if it means a week's worth of neglected laundry, a garden overrun with vigorous weeds, and a moldy dishwasher (I always forget something and this time it was turning on the dishwasher!). It was a fun (but exhausting) trip, I do not recommend traveling several thousand miles by car if accompanied by a two year old unless absolutely necessary. Perhaps the most interesting revelation of our trip (and return to civilization) was what I learned about nutrition or what some people mistake for nutrition.
Apparently a thing is not nutritious because of what it contains but rather for what it lacks. I had always laughed at jelly beans advertising that they were fat free (100% sugar) and at salt being gluten free, but I literally sat at a restaurant while the proprietor extolled the virtues of root beer. I like root beer, I don't mind if my two year old has a little bit now and then, but it is rather hilarious (and a little scary) to sit at the lunch counter of a drive in restaurant eating your hamburger while the owner gives your son a complimentary taste of his own peculiar brew while explaining that it contains no corn syrup or preservatives, etc, etc, etc… One would think by his description that we had discovered the Fountain of Youth rather than a local soda concoction consisting of mostly sugar.
Who cares that it does not contain corn syrup, it still contains sugar! I have no problem with my kid consuming either in reasonable quantities but to assume one type of sweetener is somehow 'healthier' than another is rather amusing. But what scares me is that this man must say this to parents on a regular basis and they must accept it as wisdom that somehow this drink is 'healthy' because it does not contain x, y, or z! Is there so little understanding about nutrition among the general public that we simply avoid certain things and are thus eating 'healthy?' Are we entering an age of nutritional legalism as our spiritual lives become ever more lax and vague? But then a list of rules has never allowed the spirit to flourish and I doubt it will do much for our diets either, so in this case, 'let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!'
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