The Gospel of Wellness by Rina Raphael

Author:Rina Raphael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Wait, What’s Healthy Today?

Sifting through breaking news from nutritional researchers can prove just as challenging as navigating food labels. From a young age, Americans witness an ever-changing nutritional landscape that treats food like some sort of Whac-A-Mole game. One day avocados have too much fat, the next they’re the crown jewel of any worthy millenial’s toast. Red wine might be heart-healthy, but maybe it just correlates to a Mediterranean diet. Depending on the weather, red meat is a good source of protein or will usher in a cancer apocalypse.

This dietary nitpicking inspired the parody publication The Onion to opine, “Eggs Good for You This Week” but they “may be unhealthy again as soon as next Monday.”

Having worked as a producer at NBC News for seven years, I can assure you that no one in the newsroom is afforded the time to sit back and consider what all this information cumulatively does to the audience. Many news organizations suffer from a lack of resources and staffing, forcing journalists to hammer out pieces at breakneck speed. Junior reporters grab viral items from social media or newswire offerings based on attention-grabbing headlines or top audience interests. I vividly recall laughing when some provocative food study would come across a newswire service vehemently contradicting a previous one. “Those perform well,” an editor would chime in, pushing me to publish.

Journalists don’t want to crank out a sludge of meaningless and contradictory stories, but they’re forced to when clicks reign supreme. It’s a lot like a factory farm in that if you ever saw how the media sausage is made, you’d likely put your fork down.

But this trend has been going on for a long time, and across media. Listening to the radio or reading a magazine without being bombarded with the latest nutrition discovery or a debate on keto vs. paleo is near impossible. We’re subjected to a constant tug of war over what we should and should not consume, with experts duking it out under sensationalized headlines.

At the Goop conference, I listened to panelists who depicted one’s refrigerator as a nutritional minefield. According to one Goop expert, certain fruits, vegetables, and beans are reportedly harmful to the body because they contain “toxic” plant proteins called lectins, which supposedly do not want to be eaten. Lectins are apparently plants’ clever answer to predators (that is, us) and cause inflammatory reactions that result in extra pounds and serious health conditions, such as “leaky gut syndrome.” This panelist had written a book about how plants are quite literally trying to kill us with poisons, essentially likening the produce section to Little Shop of Horrors. Lentils, edamame, and eggplant are some of the many forbidden foods that over time will make you “very, very sick.” And tomatoes—watch out, they’re inciting “chemical warfare in our bodies.”

After this talk, women were discharged into a food hall featuring twenty booths from L.A.’s top health restaurants. It was a cornucopia of bountiful vegetables, spruced-up fruits, and berry chia pudding cups—Willy Wonka’s factory for Erewhon devotees.

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