on sports and sugar

I gotta say, I am so proud of myself for not dating a sports fan. I don't know how golf widows do it. So frequently I hear my friends' young men babbling excitedly about whatever sport is in season--how the player slammed the puck straight out of the court with the bases loaded with ten seconds left to score the winning touchdown. I see them running around, using furniture and pillows to re-enact the momentous scene, even going so far as to mimic the player's particular end-zone dance, to prove to their dearest loves that this is only the awesomest thing to happen in the history of the universe. I see my friends' eyes glaze over as soon as the word "basketball" is uttered, and I watch their default game-faces set in like a dose of Botox. You know the ones--the smile that doesn't quite reach the eyes, the frequent nod of understanding, the occasional "ooh, wow!", and the gradual development of a twitch in the right side of the face that worsens as time draws closer to the Superbowl. I listen as these patient ladies comfort their distraught mates when their teams lose in spite of everything--blame the refs, blame the weather, blame anything to keep the boy from crying. They hum the school's fight song like some grim travesty of a lullaby and stroke their greasy heads that reek of so much cheap beer.
I do not envy these women. I have no patience for sports and even less for the people who enjoy them. I do not understand people who's evenings are made or ruined according to the behaviors of people they do not know who get paid whether or not they win. I don't understand the joy or the grief of game watching. The last time I watched a football game the only thing I recall feeling was my ass going numb on the aluminium bleachers. It was not a joyous experience.

In other news, since I moved to California I've decided to eliminate corn syrup from my diet. It has gone well and i feel that i am eating more healthily than ever before. Moreover, it is very easy to avoid chemical foods out here--in fact, there are chains of grocery stores here that exist on the very premise that food should be healthful and inexpensive. What a concept. Unfortunately, when i went to the east coast this winter I was reminded that this is not the case for everyone. Entire areas of the country know nothing about the contents of their food, and have no other option for sustenance than the preservative-riddled, corn-sweetened, petroleum-based offal sold by Wal-Mart. WHEN DID AMERICA DECIDE PLASTIC COULD BE SOLD AS FOOD?

You wanna know why American children are overweight? Even the ones who don't have playstation threes? You're feeding them bright pink corn-syrupy garbage. Just because the advertisers can get away with calling Lucky Charms "part of a complete breakfast" doesn't mean its okay to feed to toddlers.

What's that? You say you don't feed your toddlers bright pink food but they're still fat, ADD, lethargic morons? READ THE INGREDIENTS. Most "whole wheat yes this is good for you" bread is full of high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, hard-to-pronounce sweeteners and bizarre chemical combinations that are not good for you. They sell it as "healthy" because its brown and the first ingredient is unbleached wheat flour. But read the rest of them. Yeah, all the rest of them. Get out your periodic table and figure out which lab-developed molecule you're eating today because Post or General Mills wanted to cut corners on raw ingredients.

General rule of thumb: If it ain't found in nature, its not food. That's not to say rocks and arsenic Are food, but let's be reasonable. Scientists invented trans fats because they thought they'd be better for you. Now they're killing people. Oops. Chances are, 20,000 years of species development has figured out a lot more about what's edible than 50 years of molecular science. I'm waiting to hear that Omega 3 fatty acids are a carcinogen or the inevitable "okay, we lied, there's no such thing as good or bad cholesterol." The country only started having pandemic obesity and obesity-related disease problems since we moved our jobs inside and started eating silicone. Somebody please pass a law. We must make healthy, chemical-free food readily available to the general masses if we don't want to watch our national IQ plummet even lower.