#my dad and stepmom on the contrary eat incredibly well and stay active on the little farm they retired on

[novadreii]

On one hand it's shocking that people in their 20s and 30s are getting diagnosed with colon cancer, something that typically is only seen in people 50+ after a lifetime of pounding booze and steaks and frozen dinners. But last year I had the opportunity to get to know another family who ate in a way that honestly fucking horrified me and confirmed to me that the parents were not going to live very long lives, and the kids would follow suite because it's all they were taught.

Fast food was consumed at least once a day in the house, tall sugary drinks were purchased for everyone in the car every single time they left the house. The food at home was mostly processed, from a box of some kind. Lots of sugary snacks. Any produce purchased was usually rotting in the fridge. The parents admitted they hated cooking and the most common foods were burgers, fries, noodles, etc. Shit that needed minimal prep or planning. The only regular vegetable served with meals was a Cesar salad absolutely smothered in dressing with more croutons than lettuce. Nutritionally useless. The kids in this house struggled with insulin resistance, ADHD, and other conditions that really necessitate a nutritious diet and to keep the amount of added sugar LOW. The parents and other adults had known heart conditions, diabetes etc and would just blithely laugh it off, like OOPS my diabetes is gonna hate that I ate all these sugar cookies haha! Yeah when your extremities lose circulation and fall off I bet you'll be laughing all the way to the hospital.

My mother, the bitch that she is, at LEAST prioritized feeding us home cooked, minimally processed meals. She built up a binder of recipes that were easy enough to throw together, combined with family recipes, and shopped in a way that the basics were always on hand. Veggies were served with lunch and dinner always. Fruit with breakfast and after dinner was required. And we'd get treats too, but they'd be homemade! She just didn't believe in boxed and frozen stuff, we weren't super rich or anything but she shopped specials and made it work. I'm grateful to her for that! As an adult it's helped me cultivate a taste for produce and home made things, I honestly can't stomach the taste of ultra processed junk because I swear I can taste the preservatives and plastics.

Yes. This is a privileged position to come from, but even when I've been broke I ate cheaply by eating as I typically still do: stocking up on lean, unprocessed meat when it's on special, eggs, cottage cheese and Greek yogurt, frozen berries which are much cheaper, beans and lentils, and filling in the gaps with dark leafy greens, broc, potatoes etc. If you only drink water and don't buy anything that comes in a box or bag, this is even more affordable than eating an ultra processed diet. I know it sucks, but you gotta MAKE the time to prepare your food. Batch cook meats and a pot of chili on the weekend. Every time you cook, make sure you have at least 1 serving per person of leftovers. I'm sorry, but the answer to lack of funds/time is to get creative, plan ahead and eat whole foods. Not buy shit that you have to just pop in an air fryer (another cancerous product nobody should be buying)! The amount of people I've known who subsist off off Dino nuggets and Pepsi astounds me. And of course, they are *mysteriously* plagued with health issues they insist they have no idea what the source of is.

This is shit that's taught. If you were not raised to feed yourself properly, it's a damn hard thing to learn. And witnessing a family passing on bad food habits and therefore poor health to their kids made me so mad but of course, there was nothing I could do about it except try and introduce them to healthy homemade stuff when I could, but I know that after I left they just continued eating like shit. It's honestly very sad to me because one of my most cherished values is the joy of nourishing myself and the people I care about with food that is healthy and tastes good. I think a good life past middle age is cultivated when you're young with good food and exercise habits so we don't spend our years north of 50 in hospitals and fiddling with a million prescription medications, being a burden to our children because we couldn't be assed to care for ourselves.