When you are into nutritious, plant-based eating, you can’t help but take a peek at what foods other people in the checkout line are buying. I was really shocked today when I observed what this old man who was just in front of me was buying. There were no vegetables or fruit at all — zero, none. He bought a large amount of soda — a six pack of sugared Coke and a dozen of those little bottles of diet Ginger Ale. There were two large bottles of wine, a loaf of white bread, a quart of ice cream, and a package of chocolates that claimed to contain some peanut butter. That was it.
The man was only slightly overweight but somewhat stooped, possibly from early onset osteoporosis; his skin was splotchy with rashes on the face; and his thinning hair was lack luster with large clumps of hair missing in odd places on his scalp.
My analysis from the content of these groceries is that he is at least a moderate alcoholic with the purchase of not one but two large bottles of wine — why the need for an extra bottle? That he buys so much soda indicates that he drinks enough wine to give him serious dehydration, so that he needs all that soda in order to stay hydrated.
A diet based on white bread, ice cream, and candy, albeit with some peanut butter in the candy, is definitely a one-way ticket to anemia, possibly chronic anemia. The anemia would explain the poor condition of his skin as well as his irregular hair loss. The fatigue he would feel from chronic anemia as a result of this minimal nutrition would reinforce his alcoholism as an escape — as would resorting to eating ice cream and candy. Basically, with such low energy from this terrible diet, he may feel so overwhelmed physically that he resorts to alcohol, ice cream and candy as compensation in order to cope.
Clearly, based on this diet alone, the man knows absolutely nothing about nutrition, and so doesn’t realize what he is doing to himself with such an egregious diet. Here’s a case were ignorance isn’t bliss.
His prognosis: obviously liver disease would be in the cards, but the diet has virtually no anti-oxidants or any of the other cancer-fighting nutrients that one would get from a well-balanced diet, so tumor growth is predictable. Without much calcium or vitamin D in his diet, his mild osteoporosis, at his age, could accelerate rapidly.
All of the above is because he is completely ignorant about food — what you don’t know can kill you.
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