I’ve mentioned before that when I was about 10 years old my mother started reading Adelle Davis and completely changed our family’s diet. White bread, Twinkies, potato chips, etc. completely disappeared and were replaced with whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and so on. We even drank Tiger’s Milk (a mixture of lowfat milk, brewers yeast, wheat germ, and banana). We replaced the margarine we had been using with a healthier variety (it used safflower oil rather than cottonseed or soybean oil).
When I went away to college and then graduate school I tried to maintain that diet but it was tough. The university cafeteria had different ideas. For breakfast I ate eggs, bacon or sausage, and oat meal. For lunch and dinner I ate salad, vegetables, meat, poultry, and fish, avoiding pasta, potatoes, and other starchy carbohydrates. I drank low-fat milk with my meals to boost my protein consumption. I rarely drank soft drinks.
I’ve tried to maintain that ever since. I can’t have eaten a whole loaf of white sandwich bread in total over the last nearly three-quarters of a century. For the last twenty-five years my total annual beef consumption has been around 20 lb. I cook (I do nearly all of the cooking) using butter, olive oil, and canola oil as fats. Recently, I’ve replaced the canola oil with avocado oil. I find it has a higher smoke point.
I hate it when my primary care physician’s records characterize me as “obese”. That’s because my BMI is around 30. It’s only that because I am built differently than most American men—my legs are shorter relative to my torso (which is how they calculate BMI) and I’m more muscular. I walk 5 miles or more a day and consume fewer than 2,000 calories per day, mostly along the lines described above.
