Blog 3435 – 03.30.2025

You Are What You Eat?

I just read an article on how eating protein is important in building and maintaining muscle mass and for longevity. Since one of my longtime goals is to live a longtime, articles like that always catch my eye.

I have already outlived many of my contemporaries. This November I will have been on this particular adventure in time and space three quarters of a century. If I can continue taking care of this body there is no reason than I should not expect to get another quarter of century perhaps even more out of it.

Eating right has always been a challenge for me since I was a boy. I was a very finicky eater and we did not have a lot of extra money in the food budget in my family so the food choices were limited. The school cafeteria menu did not appeal to me so for most of grade school and the first couple of years of middle school I carried my lunch to school. It consisted of two tuna-fish sandwiches, chips, and a cake or cookies which I downed with a pint of milk. Except for perhaps the chips and desert that is not bad fuel for a growing boy.

I still have a time limiting my chip and desert intake. I heard a very educated and linguistic man on Bill Maher recently using a metaphor to describe the childishness of certain members of the current administration. He used it several times: “All they want to eat is desert.” That is never a healthy menu for anyone at any age nor the best way to behave for anyone over five.

Thankfully around the ninth grade I not only came out of my shell and became more confident, but I also began to add other tastes to my food palate. I began to be open to try different foods and found that I liked many of them as well.

The Apostle Paul quote below seems especially fitting at this point:

Too many salty/oily snacks like chips and too many deserts like cake and cookies have shortened the lives of many in my generation and left many others of us soft in the middle and mind and very childish in others ways as well.

It is high time many of us began to think and to eat like adults. We are what we eat.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White