Heart healthy and wholesome

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Let’s talk about education. This education thing keeps us strong, aware, smart, and sharp to the point. Our education system and the subjects taught within have been critically analyzed, tested, reformed, reworked, so that all kinks are straightened out. It now functions so efficiently it’s turning out the deepest of thinkers — an elite class of humans ready to take on any intellectual challenge. But wait. Nobody can muster up the energy to set down their KFC, get their oversized butt off the couch and turn off their favorite reality show.

Why is food stuck on the back burner when it comes to education? We may learn about the basic food groups and how much of each we should be partaking of every day, but anybody that has gone to a public school recently has seen what kind of options the kids have to choose from. Can you spell the word “processed” and then use it in a sentence? That’s the kind of food our future is being built on. Canned, frozen, dried, molested with refined sugars, bleached, enriched, sucked dry of all nutrients, white flour, high in sodium, hormone-injected, chemically drenched, dyed, hydrogenated. Yum yum food.

This is education: Now grab a doughnut while we discuss photosynthesis, something most people will never use in their lives. Food, on the other hand, and the consumption thereof, will be a part of everybody’s daily routine. How well are we educated on how food affects our bodies, thinking, sleep, energy levels, and attitude? America is the most obese nation in the world. I’d say we are failing this course.

You think that age comes with knowledge. But it more regularly brings habit and addiction in tow. By the time we’ve reached college we’ve become used to cavities, headaches, bad knees and backs from carrying the spare tire around our gut, sleepless nights from our GI tract trying to process all the crap in it, and trying to maintain a sugar high to counter all the negative effects caused by eating sugar.

I’m surprised that in a place of higher education like UVU I see such uneducated choices in foods being served in the food court. Worse yet is the mislabeling of foods in an effort to make people think they’re eating something healthy when they are not. “Heart Healthy and Wholesome”: (one of the labels found in the upstairs cafeteria at UVU.) Funny thing is, only about 5 percent of what they serve is actually good for your heart, and it’s so saturated in butter and salt that it is no longer healthy. Three cheese pasta made with bleached white flour. Give me a break. What a scam. This sign, “Heart Healthy and Wholesome,” is terribly misleading. It’s wrong to make those less knowledgeable about healthful food believe that what they are eating is healthy. Either change the sign or change the food.

-Russ Lee, Yoga Instructor @ UVU