Nutritionally Deficient

Clearly, healthy eating in our culture is a complicated subject these days. Everyone is either on a diet or believes that they have developed the next great cure in the battle of the bulge. We are bombarded daily with all sorts of new information telling us what to eat, such as only meat products or lemonade with maple syrup and cayenne pepper. Both sound like fabulous ways to live one’s life if you never plan on enjoying it. Everyday there’s something new we shouldn’t be eating and something else the powers that be have decided should not be in our foods and we are supposed to check every nutrition label and root out this evil from our homes. It’s no wonder that people are continually confused about what is good for us and what is not. However, if you search hard enough you can find a study that tells you what you want to hear, just look at chocolate; don’t tell me that Hershey’s did not have a hand in dark chocolate making its resurgence on the diet scene. With all these nutritional reports changing at a frenetic pace, some people have just decided to develop their own theories about what is and what is not healthy for them. Some are based on fact and some are based on misguided beliefs that formed at the dinner table during their youth, before trans fats and white carbohydrates became the enemy.

My husband falls into the latter of these two categories. He was raised on, how do I put this nicely, not the healthiest of diets. Lots of meats, cream of anything on everything, desserts like each day was a wedding tasting, etc. Consequently, in spite of my husband’s continuous athletic pursuits that resulted in him being a football player during his undergraduate career, he developed into a husky man with a hearty appetite. He also possessed an extremely skewed view when it came to nutrition. I like to think of him as nutritionally disabled, a condition that when treated with medical attention and therapy, could possibly be overcome.

His condition first came to light when my husband went to college and he encountered his first taste of dining hall food. Like most young students, new to the delicacies that make up dorm dining, as a lump of white food was placed on his plate, he immediately asked what it was. Mashed potatoes was the response. This confounded him as he told his fellow dining mates, “No they’re not. Mashed potatoes are yellow.” One might think that he was trying to crack a joke to his new friends, but, sadly, he was being completely serious. Until that day, he had only come across mashed potatoes in a form so butter-laden that none of the original white potato color shined through. He was reared with the belief that this was how mashed potatoes looked. It was a wonder that he did not have cardiac arrest before he got to college with that kind of upbringing. It would also probably not surprise people to learn that he had a similar reaction to rice. It too, he was under the false impression, was best served with a yellow hue. Apparently butter was used more liberally in his house, during his youth than in Paula Deen’s kitchen.

To further elaborate on the fact that trying to convince my husband that butter was not the wonder-food he thought it was, he once genuinely explained to me that butter is healthier in liquid form. Therefore, eating butter on top of a massive cauldron of popcorn at the movie theater was acceptable and apparently even nutritious. He seemed to somewhat grasp by this point, that hardened butter had its issues, but held fast to the theory that when liquefied, it mutated into a health food. You can see what I was dealing with here.

Through our years together, he has continued to defy common sense and logic when passing along his dietary wisdom. For example, vegetables perplexed him. On more than one occasion, he told me he didn’t want to eat vegetables because they had too many calories. Seriously. Maybe this was true in his house where I saw first hand how all of the nutritional value could be sucked out of a normally healthy food like broccoli by upturning a carton of Parkay and Velveeta on top. I tried to explain to him that in the real world outside of “Butterland”, as I started referring to his mother’s kitchen, vegetables were actually low in fat and calories and could even be dietarily sound. Nevertheless, this was the man who believed that French fries were a vegetable and therefore a heart smart choice. Sure, they were a vegetable, a tuber if you will, but that was where the good-for-you similarities ended.

One night after he arrived home post-happy hour with some friends, we engaged in a discussion about his desire to lose some weight. In jest, I suggested a pudding diet, as he seemed to enjoy eating the sugar free cups of vanilla creaminess that I had been buying as healthy treats. Excited does not even begin to describe how he felt about this idea. He started calling out flavors that he wanted to have and even posted his plans on his Facebook page. I attempted to explain the dearth of nutrients that would result from partaking in this diet, but he wasn’t listening. It was only after he learned that he might have issues with, let’s say, fully processing this diet that he decided perhaps it was not in his best interest after all. It was intriguing that not receiving protein, minerals, vitamins, etc. did not pose a problem for him, but the thought of not being able to take his morning constitutional was a deal-breaker.

I think I am making progress with my husband in terms of healthy foods, but I am continually surprised by his nutritional knowledge deficits. It is almost like he gets his advice out of the fake newspaper The Onion. He loves to seize the news tidbits that say, “beer is good for you”, omitting the -in moderation part, or “potatoes are healthy”, conveniently forgetting the detail about not covering them in so much butter that it would clog the artery of a moose. In reality, I don’t expect perfection or even something close; I just do not want him to seriously scar future generations with his “wisdom”.

Like any true deficiency, nutritional or informational, the best course of action is to give my husband what he is missing. While I will continue to try and erase the erroneous beliefs about food that my husband internalized throughout his youth with modern data and facts, I have a feeling that while I might make some headway it will ultimately be like telling an Italian not to eat pasta or the Japanese to avoid the sushi. There is only so much I can do to counteract tradition and time; maybe butter is in his blood, but at least now that butter is the light kind.