Gluten and Guilt
We felt the animosity immediately. A vast Thanksgiving Day feast lay before us, and our hostess had placed the vegetables, the "special" ones, next to our plates with the delicacy of a curator handling a Rembrandt.
"Don't worry," she said, "there's no butter on them. I know you can't do butter. There's just a little margarine."
With as much tact as we could muster, we said thanks, but we didn't really want to do either. The hostess pulled the dish out from under what she considered our upturned noses. We apologized for the inconvenience, as we always do, but we'd stick to the turkey.
"Don't you think you're taking this whole food thing a little too far?" our hostess asked. Her posture had gone from welcoming to glacial within a matter of seconds. "I mean, it's not going to kill you."
My wife and I have experienced this attitude consistently ever since we got serious about nutrition. And by nutrition, I mean not only eating our fruits and vegetables and avoiding processed foods, but also steering clear of those foods to which we have sensitivities, as well as those that may cause allergic reactions, primarily gluten and dairy. Unfortunately, that eliminates a broad range of choices.
It started a year ago when my wife, who never met a problem she couldn't research online, decided to have an allergy test, both food and environmental. Turns out, the food issues were numerous. Shortly thereafter, she began seeing a naturopathic physician who recommended specific dietary and lifestyle changes, as well as an arsenal of enzymes and herbal supplements.
I have battled digestive disorders my entire life, so I followed soon after. My allergy test revealed low-level allergies to nearly every staple in my diet: chicken, beef, eggs, dairy, spinach, asparagus, melon and beans. I was shocked. Was I supposed to never have chicken again? Wasn't that the healthier alternative to red meat?
On top of my food allergies, the naturopath strongly suspected that a lifelong sweet tooth had caused candidiasis, an overgrowth of yeast that is a source of inflammation and further digestive distress. So now, in addition to cutting out the chicken, eggs and the rest, and increasing my water intake to a veritable reservoir, she advised me to embark on a six-month sugar fast.
This was the last straw. How could this crazy witch doctor expect me to make such drastic dietary changes? Over the previous couple of years, I had quit smoking and cut my drinking substantially, which was not heavy but consistent. "I'm not made of stone," I thought. "Allow me just one vice. Anything. How about coffee? Can I at least keep that?"
I was afraid of depriving my pleasure center of so many stimulants in such a short period of time. Surely such deprivations would cause some kind of terrible withdrawal.
I was rationalizing, of course. In fact, I developed a routine to ease the pain of transition. My wife cooked wonderful meals free of the offending foods, and I soon learned that eating well is not drudgery — except at holidays when the cakes and cookies flow abundantly, and she patiently bears the brunt of my petulance and indignation.
The most troubling aspect of our nutritional adventure was the response from friends and relatives. I expected support, a hearty "good for you," or, at the very least, shrugs of indifference. Instead, we found ourselves on the receiving end of doubt and hostility. We were baffled.
When I quit smoking, the congratulations flowed endlessly, but this new dietary/vitamin narrative produced only annoyed sighs and skeptical reprimands. It's not scientifically proven. I wouldn't put too much stock in it. And the big one: Aren't you overreacting?
Never mind the overwhelming health statistics in this country: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancers of all types. Our friends refused to believe that diet had anything to do with it.
My wife and I pondered this often and came to the conclusion that the response was a form of denial. If our path of organic food and herbal supplements was indeed the correct one, then the more traditional lifestyle of processed food and hope in the curative power of pharmaceuticals could only lead to disease and degeneration. Who wants to contemplate that?
The open hostility seemed to be a response to a perceived dietary elitism, a challenge to the meat-and-potatoes staple that had made this country great, and that had served the rest of them quite well, thank you very much. People have complex and deeply psychological relationships with food. To tell them that what they have believed their entire lives is wrong is to pull the rug out from under their feet, and people tend to prefer a solid footing.
We don't preach. We don't lecture those around us about the evils of trans fats or high fructose corn syrup. We simply make other choices; but, since we also choose to interact socially, the two often collide.
We tell prospective hosts not to worry; we'll either make do or bring our own. But inevitably, they try to accommodate our needs and then become angry when those accommodations are worse than the problem — when the margarine is worse than the butter. And so we apologize for our demands and at the same time, feel some anger of our own.
We do not provoke these responses, but still must deal with the insecurities of those around us, those who insist on eating fast food and denying the long-term effects, those who look at the myriad of degenerative diseases afflicting this country and ascribe it to fate or genetics.
I guess we can only do what we can do: eat well and treat the causes of our ailments in a holistic, preemptive way rather than waiting to get sick and slapping a synthetic drug on the symptom. I still miss the sugar, and I treat myself on occasion, but the results speak for themselves.
My wife and I now feel healthier, have more energy and most importantly, we treat our bodies with the respect that comes from knowledge. If that's elitism, then so be it.