My auntie — the one who helped raise me — lived to the ripe old age of 94. For the most part she was quite healthy... although she was always afflicted with high blood pressure, and later in life she had a touch of Parkinson's, although not enough to be fatal.
She pretty much ate whatever she wanted and quite frequently would have a couple of beers with lunch. And lunch would sometimes include some of the very old fashioned Danish foods such as pig fat sandwiches... meaning basically a slice of rye bread with rendered fat from pork belly and maybe a few salty crispy onions.
By today's extraordinarily synthesized perspectives on what one should eat and one should not eat those would all be considered pretty much a heart attack on a plate.
But the point about my auntie was that she ate pretty much everything... in moderation. She by no means would have pig fat sandwiches every day, just once in a while. She ate various other things that were not particularly healthy but she only ate them once in a while.
She also didn't eat giant mounded plates of food just the amount that made her no longer feel hungry which was often fairly modest. The thing we call a "sub" sandwich from a place like Subway, would likely have been enough food for two or three days for her. She would have enjoyed it but she would have looked at a whole sandwich and declared "that's a ridiculous amount of food!"
I think we sometimes look at nutritional health through unrealistic lenses of perception, or perhaps through irrelevant lenses of perception.
Like my auntie, I am also dealing with high blood pressure and I'm often getting nutritional advice from my doctor. One of the things that is sort of interesting about it is that my doctor recommends a list of things that I should eat and it turns out I already eat those. When I poke around in that a little bit further I realize that the base assumption is that I have horrible eating habits to begin with. However, that is the wrong starting point as I was brought up to eat modest amounts of food and not to just obsessively go overboard on any one thing.
I definitely have an appreciation for eggs and bacon for breakfast but I don't eat eggs and bacon every day and I don't eat a mountain of eggs and bacon when I do eat it.
Here in the USA we teach people a lot of things about health and nutrition but the one thing that people seldom touch on is not so much what we're eating but portion size. But I guess it's almost un-American to not go for the biggest you possibly can. It is almost as if controlling how much we eat is betraying the idea that we "deserve to have it all." So we eat three pounds of celery sticks... and feel shitty.
Of course we could argue that maybe we do deserve to have it all but just because we deserve it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to take that to extremes every single day.
I don't know if I'll be able to live as long as my auntie did but if I do... I will certainly be well satisfied with having gotten a life of such length. Until then, I'm going to continue pretty much eating whatever I want except for keeping it in modest amounts.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a wonderful remainder of your week!
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2026.10.21 02:07 PDT
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