To be sick of being told everything's going to kill me?

[ThingsToDoWithStickyStars]

When life itself (with age and time) will do the job neatly enough!

I eat a good diet am very active, and am pretty happy with my lifestyle, but do notice with each year there's another thing I ought to be doing (or not doing), or something I should not be eating, eating more of, and so on. I can only do my best, and that's all I am prepared to do.

So recently my SIL has been 'doing research' and has altered all the family meals. It's going well, and it's their business, but she has been mailing me links to some miserable stuff, much of which I already had a decent knowledge of (ethics, environment), but much more that I wasn't aware of, too. I appreciate her advice, but some of it would be almost impossible to deal with, such as -

1. All wheat and grains, oats, barley, the lot are poisoned with pesticides which are known to be cancerous .

2. Almost all fruit and veg have dangerous levels of pesticides, yet not everything is available as organic in every town/supermarket/grocer, etc.

3. Crops from overseas that use toxic chemicals banned here are allowed to be sold within the UK when imported.

4. And from one article: "Pesticides appear in millions of different combinations and varying concentrations in our food so it’s simply impossible to design a system sophisticated enough to protect us from these chemical cocktails. The only way forward is to cut our overall pesticide use significantly".

And this is in addition to the plastics, pollution, and all the rest.

It's insane. I don't doubt it's true, but if you were to follow this to the letter you would be left with very little to eat. It would be impossible to avoid for the most part due to actually having a life (eating out, holidays, friends/families houses, school, etc).
I personally can't live like that, even though I am very mindful of what I consume, and I do wonder if such endless articles and reports are resulting in a good deal of neuroticism and fear.

Luckily my SIL isn't pushy, but she knows I love reading about food and nutrition, so probably thought I'd like to see it. Well, I wish I bloody hadn't .

Forgot to add, I took the quote from an article, here.

I would reply with 'You know what else is good for your health? Minding your own business'. I bloody hate people like this. We should be able to sue them for loss of enjoyment of life.

Urgh I just cannot be doing with stuff like this, life really is too short.

Dr (consultant) told me just before Christmas to either cut out or massively reduce
Coffee, dairy - milk/cheese/eggs -, alcohol, simple carbs. No baking as I’ll eat what I’ve made with the grandchildren. No bread. No red meat. No processed food.
Happy with my BMI and exercise level.
Honestly? I’m not giving up coffee and frankly after 20 years of watching my carb intake I’ve had enough. I know it’s good advice but I was brought up on bread and potatoes and I have limited them already. A lot.
Now it looks like the veg I should be eating is going to poison me.

Mate a few of the ones over my lifetime:

Eggs are giving you cholesterol because they are full of it
Eggs are full of salmonella
Eating British beef will give you CJD
Salt is bad for you
All fats are bad for you
Red wine is good, no bad, no good, no bad
Chocolate is good for you
Jogging is good for you (huge impact damage possible before anyone starts)
Fish is full of mercury

I'm sure I've forgotten a few

I know what you mean, my husband has this app I think it’s called yuka or something similar, he now scans all our food when we go shopping, I can see his point but it does get a bit wearing, especially now we don’t have the bread I like and have to put up with the only one that scores highly, trouble is it’s tasteless! I told him to clear off when he started to scan my make up.

I’m also fed up of the media/government trying to terrify us all constantly, take the weather report, we used to get nice sunshine magnets on the weather board now we have red raging inferno graphics if the weather gets above 20 degrees, if it’s -1 we are told to stay at home as the cold will kill us all but don’t light your woodburner because you will get lung disease, it’s endless and frankly I’m sick to death of it and don’t get me started on the government alarm to terrify us all, how did we manage to survive without it 🙄

When you think about it even our water supply is contaminated with microplastics and the air we breathe full of chemicals that are pumped into it.

Rather than all of the things that are in everything we eat and drink, one of the biggest killers is stress. If you worry about every little thing you eat and drink, the stress from the worry about it will kill you long before the chemicals!

We are lucky as DH is a very keen gardener amd grows much of our veg and some fruit. Most of the rest of what we buy is organic.
i don't see what else can be done. I'm not going to give up eating otherwise healthy fruit and veg because someone is taking it to extremes - it would be very unhealthy indeed to cut all fruit and vegetables from your diet because of this.
Moderation in all things.

The world has always been full of stuff that’ll kill you! Difference is that once upon a time it was sabre tooth tigers, smallpox and other cavemen, and now it’s pesticides, too much cheese and microplastics. I’m glad to be alive in the death by cheese era!

My late DM used to drive me mad telling me all the latest scare stories. Every week it was 'Did you know....' followed by a story on the latest research on some food,drink or lifestyle choice. It got to the point where I said to her that if I took notice of every single report about this,that and the other,I'd never do anything.

If you look up the "dirty dozen" foods, and conversely, the "clean 15", this might help prioritise.

I find a simple reply of “we’re all going to die of something” quite helpful. Or “what doesn’t kill me and all that”

I am wondering, if one stuck to the advice in full, all things considered, what the heck would people eat? I can source a lot of organic produce, but it's sporadic, not always local even in rural areas, and hopeless if you eat outside of the home.

What is left to consume?
Even nuts, legumes and wholegrains are harming us according to that article.

death by cheese era

More likely to get hit by a bus, ignore.

Step away from the Daily Mail. Not the OP necessarily, but people in general. Indeed, step away from NEWS. The news is always trying to tell you that something will kill you, so it's hard to spot the genuine threats among the general doom. This song is still very relevant, especially the long list of what you might get cancer from.

Other miscellaneous threats:
Terrorists around every corner.
TV gives you square eyes.
The Millennium bug. Yes, I know, it was real, and the reason it didn't bite was because it was fixed in time. But the papers laid the idea of impending apocalypse on thick.
Your mobile phone is frying your brain. Not because of an excess of social media (which is the modern threat), but because of those evil radio waves, before social media was a thing.
Weapons of mass destruction.
Diesel is the greener choice.
Actually, the car manufacturers lied (and in some cases, fiddled the software). Petrol is the greener choice.
Electric is the greener choice: don't look at where the materials come from, or how the batteries are disposed of: nothing to see there.
NHS on its knees every single winter.
Buckingham Palace falling down regularly, so the Queen needs your money, otherwise she'll have to wear a hard hat instead of a crown.

All this is one reason why some of us found it very hard to take the daily panic which was thrown at us in 2020 seriously: because of the media throwing doom at us all the time, they had nothing left for when it really mattered.

My SIL is exactly the same. Also more ‘ill’ (read hypochondriac) than anyone else in the family. I tune her out. Smile and nod whilst thinking about other matters.

I don't really touch newspapers, but it will still find you via word of mouth.

Tbh I have seen a good amount of panic on MN regarding foods, especially UPF and the organic debate. It seems like an even split of concern vs nonchalance.

It's handy to have the info but the balance is way too tipped towards doom and gloom. I appreciate that industrialisation (capitalism) is destroying us and the planet, but many people are caught in a bind. I don't envy someone trying to feed a family in this climate of panic.

Tell her that the stress of worrying about it to this extent is more likely to kill her!
I'm all for eating a healthy diet. But for me that means cooking with healthy raw ingredients and eating a balanced diet. I don't obsess about things it's hard to avoid. We're all going to die of something sooner or later. Avoiding things because of pesticides isn't going to help you if you die in a car accident! Life is for living, and that involves eating what you want in moderation.

Upset you’ve seen it and that someone shared it with you, yet happy to share it with thousands of people on the internet.

It’s not like you can do anything about this if it’s real, just live your life and try not to obsess over things you can’t control.

Well, I get your point!
And true, we can't do a lot about it, even if we tried. I wonder if it's a lucrative business, creating articles aimed at scaring people..probably. These articles turn up every day at this point whether you have a dedicated SIL or not!

Bugger that 🤣 Is cutting all that out going to make me immortal?

Yes - I'm definitely eating it then
No - I'm definitely eating it then

I used to have an ED and I find all the clean/dirty food connotations really unhelpful, unless i had literally dropped my plate of food on the floor, im not going to consider any food dirty.

It's looking at it in terms of pesticides, which is what the thread is about. But look I don't want to start a thing and I hope you're well now. I'd eat floor food!