I am no longer especially young.
Not old enough to be called ancient with dignity, but old enough to hear the floorboards creak beneath the architecture.
Old enough that the body occasionally sends memoranda.
A twinge here.
A number there.
A physician looking thoughtful for slightly too long.
You begin to smell the fragrance of mortality, faintly at first.
Then more often.
And like everyone else, I have my demons.
Mine do not come in bottles.
Mine come on plates.
Good food, specifically.
Not fast-food slop, mind you. I have never been particularly seduced by industrial grease wrapped in paper. We cook at home. Proper food. There is always something simmering, roasting, braising.
Civilized vice.
My problem has never been quality.
It is quantity.
I can eat.
And when I say eat, I do not mean politely nibble through a balanced serving while discussing mindfulness.
I mean mountains.
The kind of appetite that would have made one a respected peasant in the 17th century.
Useful in harvest season.
Less ideal in sedentary modernity.
And yet, through repeated self-inflicted experiments, I stumbled onto something mildly heretical.
Every time I cut carbohydrates severely for a while—seriously cut them, not perform dietary theater—I watch a remarkable thing happen.
Problems begin retreating.
Inflammation eases.
The liver improves.
Prediabetic markers soften.
Even the plaque story appears less theatrical.
Skin stops itching.
Sleep deepens.
Vision sharpens.
One almost begins to suspect the machinery likes this arrangement.
And here is the truly rude part:
No medication.
No pharmaceutical priesthood intervening.
No miracle compounds.
Just removing a large chunk of what we were told, for decades, ought to form the nutritional foundation of life.
Then, inevitably, I relapse.
The seductive return of breads, grains, the warm conspiracies of starch.
And over time, the old deterioration creeps back in like a tax authority.
Every time.
Same pattern.
Same outcome.
Repeatable enough to stop pretending coincidence.
At which point an awkward thought intrudes.
Perhaps the old food catechism was wrong.
Not slightly off.
Wrong.
Those sacred classroom diagrams—the food pyramid, that bureaucratic obelisk of nutritional wisdom—looks, in retrospect, less like science and more like propaganda laminated for children.
We were taught cereals were virtuous.
Muesli was health.
Grains were foundational.
Base of the pyramid.
The broad pedestal upon which vitality supposedly stood.
Really?
Interesting theology.
Pigs, meanwhile, are fattened on crushed corn.
A detail curiously omitted from the liturgy.
One begins to notice how often nutritional orthodoxy resembles ideology with laboratory accessories.
Decades of dogma.
Low-fat hysteria.
Sugar hidden behind euphemisms.
Processed grains canonized.
Meanwhile waistlines balloon, metabolic disorders spread, and entire industries bloom to manage diseases suspiciously linked to the dietary advice itself.
Quite the business model.
Feed people badly.
Medicate consequences.
Call it healthcare.
And if one notices improvement through simply refusing the approved script?
Well, that is filed under anecdote.
Everyone lies.
Or perhaps more precisely:
Every institution lies when too much depends on having been right.
That includes nutritional priesthoods.
Especially them.
Now I am not claiming carbohydrates are demonic entities dispatched from agricultural hell.
Though wheat occasionally behaves suspiciously.
I am saying something simpler.
Pay attention when your own body runs controlled experiments more honestly than public doctrine does.
Repeatedly.
With measurable outcomes.
That matters.
Because personal observation has become strangely unfashionable.
People trust government diagrams over their own blood markers.
Trust slogans over symptoms.
Trust pyramids.
I increasingly do not.
Age does that.
It makes one less romantic about official truths.
And perhaps that is one quiet privilege of growing older:
You begin to notice how much received wisdom was merely fashionable nonsense with institutional backing.
Including, perhaps especially, what they told us to eat.
Funny species.
We feed livestock grain to fatten them.
Then call it health food for humans.
And somehow I am the heretic for noticing.
https://www.masterresource.org/agriculture/new-food-pyramid-blow-climate-activism/