Eat Crap and Die! A Test of Eating Skills for Ages 15–21

Look in the mirror. What do you see? Is your image scary or pleasant? Hopeful or dreadful? Capable or faking it?

Whether you see yourself as smart or dumb, as gorgeous or hideous, as confident or meek, there’s one skill that, if you master it, will truly show you just how smart, successful, sexy, and sure of yourself you can be.

What is that skill?

Let me give you a hint. You have to perform this skill at least three times a day, every day, for life. And perhaps one day you’ll have to perform this skill for others as well as yourself.

If your answer was eating, you got it.

Eating is a skill. Selecting and preparing food is an art, equal parts instinct and common sense. The body remains engaged in some aspect of eating even long after a meal. Eating is what keeps you alive and, beyond that, it can keep you healthy…or help you die of disease. Mastery of healthy eating skills will empower you to heal when you’re sick. It will keep you in athletic shape and help you maintain your correct weight. It will even hold you together through the hard times.

Eating creates the person you want to see in the mirror—not just the face or body. Eating can also influence your mental health. What you eat can make you happy, confident, and in touch with yourself or irritable, impatient, and depressed—even to the point of feeling crazy, murderous, or suicidal.

When I was seven years old, I had a pet mouse. My mother wouldn’t let it stay in the house, so I had to keep it in the basement. That’s where it died. Why? Because I was just a kid, and I had no idea of the seriousness of taking care of another life form. When I forgot to feed the mouse, it died of starvation. If the mouse had been left alone to live in the wild, it would have known what to eat to be a healthy mouse—unless someone tricked it into eating poison.

Eating is that clear cut: if you don’t eat, you die. But there’s more to it than that from a practical, day-to-day standpoint—the real point is what you eat. Eating crap means you’re starving your body a little every day. Long before you die, you’ll have suffered from starvation in a hundred ways.

Test Your Eating Skills

Yet our culture hasn’t taught you the single most important skill you need above all others: how to feed yourself. It’s been several generations since we could identify healthy food. Granted, it wasn’t much of a challenge back then—they didn’t have junk food or packaged food, and fast-food restaurants hadn’t been invented yet. In the 1800s, when we started refining sugar and wheat, it became harder and harder to remember what healthy food looked and tasted like. That’s why your parents and grandparents never learned the difference between high-quality and low-quality food. And if your parents can’t teach you about healthy food, the government and well-meaning school systems will step in. They’ll take advantage of the situation, using it as just one more way to control your life. The food industry is only in it for the money, and commercial farms are just big corporations that support the industry, so no help there. How are you supposed to get this information?

You have to do what kids your age once learned to do back in the old days. You have to hunt for it.

Before you start on your hunt, let’s take stock of what skills you might already have in the following true-or-false test. Please answer the questions according to how you actually live, not on what you think the right answer is.

**The Eat Crap and Die! Eating Skills Test**

Begin!

I down one or more bottles/cans of soda every day:
T F
Food is anything I can swallow that won’t immediately make me throw up or die:
T F
Cooking isn’t worth learning because it’s too hard, boring, expensive, messy, inconvenient, and/or time consuming:
T F
Chlorinated water is safe and good for you:
T F
I have a candy bar for breakfast at least once a week:
T F
Pastries (donuts, cake, etc.), white bread, pasta, breakfast cereals, white rice, and chips are healthy because grain is the biggest chunk of the food pyramid:
T F
Fluoridated water is a good way to protect against cavities:
T F
As long as I exercise every day, I can eat whatever I want and still stay healthy:
T F
When I have kids, if I feed them the same foods I eat every day, they’ll be as healthy as I am:
T F
Food sprayed with pesticides and herbicides is healthier for me to eat:
T F
Pasteurized vitamin D milk is a good source of calcium:
T F
My body and brain will be normal and healthy no matter what I eat:
T F
Eating fat makes you fat:
T F

Pencils down!

So how did you do? If you answered true to more than three questions, you flunked. And that means one thing:

Nature considers you to be an idiot, with little to no chance of surviving on your own, either in civilization or in the wild.

There’s nothing more obnoxious than a teenager who is an idiot. After all, most teenagers think they’re the smartest person in the room. They tend to talk and act as if they know everything about everything, and everyone else is the idiot. Unfortunately, no matter how cool your clothes are, or how high your math grades are, or how much smarter you are than your parents—if you don’t know how to feed yourself, you are an idiot.

But don’t worry, you’re not alone. You’re surrounded by idiots. Even professional idiots with lots of letters after their names don’t know how to properly feed themselves or their young. Highly intelligent, professional, educated, and wealthy people don’t automatically know what a mother lion or even a mother mouse both know by instinct: how to feed their young.

Yes, human beings are more complicated than mice. We have a more complex brain and nervous system for starters. But isn’t this all the more reason that feeding our young correctly is so critical—not only for human health but for the health of future generations?

Before you waste any more time convinced of your brilliance and superiority, ask yourself this question:

If I had to raise a baby right now, would it live?

Would I know what to do if it got sick? Would I know the difference between breast feeding and bottle feeding? Would my baby be healthy and smart? If my kid got fat, would I know why? Would I know effective, healthy ways to help my child lose weight?

Do you think these are stupid questions because knowing how to feed a baby won’t matter until you’re older? Tell me this: How are you going to know what to do when you’re older? Do you think by then you’ll have read the right book? Do you think it’s a no-brainer because all you have to do is buy formula and baby food? Or do you think when you have a baby instinct will kick in and you’ll automatically know how to take care of it, just like a mouse or lion?

That would be great. I wish it worked that way: you have a baby and POOF! Suddenly you and your spouse—two people who have no clue how to feed themselves—are somehow going to know how to feed someone else.

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. The result is that every creature in nature knows how to raise a healthy body and brain without having to buy packaged baby food—except civilized man.

You may have noticed there’s a great deal of confusion in our society about what foods are best to eat. One book will say the following: fat is bad, meat is bad, grains are good, pasteurized milk is good, and sugar is okay in moderation. But in the next book you learn healthy fat is good, meat is good, grains are good, raw milk is good, and sugar is still bad.

The confusion is created by food manufacturers who develop brilliant marketing schemes to dumb down—even obliterate—the common sense of our ancestors. We think we’re listening to experts, to people who know better. But we’re actually being exposed to lies and advertisements that prey on our weaknesses.

Seven Consumer Weaknesses Preyed Upon by the Food Industry

Junk food addiction
Addiction to convenience
Ignorance about causes of health
Misplaced trust in commercial interests
Misplaced trust in pharmaceutical interests
Resistance to thinking for ourselves
Passive acceptance of adulterated foods

These commercial interests are accomplices, but they’re not solely to blame. After all, they’re not in business to protect us from ourselves—they’re in business to make money. We’re complicit when we give them our authority, which we do. Like all predators, they can smell fear. They don’t force us at gun point to eat this stuff; they use our own stupidity against us. They figured out long ago that most of us are far from vigilant. We don’t care to think about what’s done to our food, and we’ve allowed ourselves to be sucked into the idea that eating should, above all, be convenient. And it’s working! We simply want to think, Damn, I’m hungry! and expect a box of food to instantly appear in front of us with instructions that read: “Open. Insert contents into face.”

The food industry figured out how to appeal to our most infantile needs, and they invented a feast of foods that pacify our juvenile mentality. Like magicians, they can make complete chemical crap taste and smell good. Just look at rainbow-colored breakfast cereals, fast foods drowned in sugary barbecue sauce, and giant blue soft drinks. Need I say more?

You might be asking, “What’s wrong with you? These are all normal foods that everyone eats—how bad can they be?”

Bad. Very bad. Sure, everyone eats them. Guess what else everyone does? They get sick, try to keep from getting sick, take medicines to control their illnesses, struggle to control their weight, or battle their insomnia.

Manufacturers made these invented foods by removing their food value: nutrients, enzymes, living microbe cultures. Can you guess why? Because real food is alive. And food corporations can’t have living food expiring on the grocery shelf. They have to keep it from spoiling long enough to get trucked across the country and hang out on grocery shelves until people buy it—or the industry loses big $$$!

Another problem is that we like our food cheap. The industry capitalizes on that by growing as much as they can for as little as they can. Quality is not a priority, but quantity is.

“Problems” with Selling Fresh Food—And How the Food Industry “Solves” Them (Stupidly)

Pasteurize and homogenize: Milk starts out as a raw food, but the dairy industry pasteurizes it (that is, cooks it) until the enzymes we need for calcium absorption and the proteins we need to build tissue are both destroyed. They also homogenize it, which damages the fat molecules in order to keep the cream from separating from the milk.
Refine and process: Grain contains vital nutrients and oils, particularly organic grain…until food manufacturers refine it. This process removes the nutrients. Next they spray manmade, chemical vitamins back into the flour and call it “enriched.”
Hydrogenize: Oil is rich in fatty acids and other nutrients, but the industry hydrogenates it—that is, chemically strips it of nutrients—in order to keep it from spoiling.
Pump with antibiotics: Animal meat contains the highest concentration of precious nutrients, but the meat industry raises livestock in unhealthy conditions and feeds them a diet of unnatural, incorrect foods medicated with antibiotics and hormones and contaminated with pesticides and herbicides.

Fighting Back

Back in the late 1800s, a counterattack against the commercial interests that profit from our ignorance began. It began quietly enough. It began with a handful of people who had genuinely curious minds and astute powers of observation. It began with scientists, doctors, researchers, moms, and dads. They weren’t out to force an agenda. Rather, they sought an answer to a simple question: What is the connection between food and health?

Instead of wasting time and money trying to figure out the causes of each disease, they began researching the causes of health. One of them, Dr. Weston Price, studied healthy people. He traveled the world to document the diets of indigenous populations who were free of disease. He filmed and wrote about what happened when these once-healthy people started eating white bread, white sugar, and refined oils. It wasn’t pretty. Adults who switched from their own natural diet to a crappy diet of refined, processed food suffered from rotten teeth, increased infections, and shortened lifespan. The children born to them had birth defects such as cleft palates, club feet, and underdeveloped dental arches.

When your dental arches are too small, there’s not enough room in your head for all your teeth. Because they’re crowded, they’re forced to grow in crookedly. Sound familiar?

What else is in your head? Oh right, your brain. If your teeth haven’t enough room, most likely your brain doesn’t either. Perhaps that explains a lot about us.

Today, kids are still born with these and other birth defects. The difference is that today we can go to the dentist or the doctor. For a great deal of money, and a good deal of trauma, these hardworking professionals correct our defects. Cosmetically we might look healthier, or at least normal, but the invisible effects of malnourishment both in the womb and through childhood continue to weaken our health for the rest of our lives. It even affects our children. And grandchildren.

Stop this destructive cycle. Get to know the work of nutrition health pioneers. You can start with articles by Dr. Royal Lee, Dr. George Goodheart, Dr. Weston Price, and Dr. Francis Pottenger. These are just a few of what you’ll find—for free—at the Selene River Press Historical Archives.

Join the Hunt for Superior Nutrition

We’ve talked about the confusion over what makes food good and how to eat for healthy results. And we’ve talked about the nutrition science pioneers whose research led us to first-hand knowledge of how to recognize real food. Now it’s time for you to start your own hunt for this knowledge and skill.

A good place to begin is a little book with a big title: Why Your Doctor Offers Nutritional Supplements. Right at the beginning you’ll find a color reproduction of Indians Hunting Buffalo, a painting by Charles M. Russell. The caption reads, “The quest for superior nutrition has never been easy.”

Russell’s painting depicts a slender Native American man atop a trim horse riding at full gallop. He’s surrounded by a massive herd of buffalo. His only defense is his bow and his skill hunting on horseback. Can you picture yourself working that hard, taking that much risk, to feed yourself and your family?

No and no. Why would anyone want to live like that when we can find better ways? Congratulations to us for freeing ourselves from the drudgery and dangers of living from one meal to the next, never knowing if we’ll starve or be killed first.

But better and safer ways to obtain superior nutrition must not include destroying the value of food. This will result in the destruction of the human genetic fabric.

So join the hunt as we now know it—through education and research. Don’t groan the moment you realize you’ll have to make some effort here! It only takes a little more work to eat healthier now, but it will take a hell of a lot more work to try to fix your ailing body when you get older.

The sooner you get informed, the sooner you can develop self-health skills that will help your brain work better, get your weight under control, and sustain your energy through busy days. The education and information you need is exactly what Selene River Press provides. Think of SRP as your guide through the wilderness of nutrition health information.

At SRP, you’ll find books written by men and women who pioneered the entire field of nutrition health. You’ll also find books by men and women of today who continue to build on their predecessors’ legendary work. Read all about Dr. Weston Price’s study of indigenous people in his fascinating book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Find great grain recipes—and learn the traditional ways of cooking grain to prevent allergies—in Katharina Gustavs’s Super Breakfast Cereals.

Don’t make the mistake of looking back on “primitive” man and thinking you’re smarter in every way. The fact is that when it comes to eating—the most basic aspect of human survival—you’re an idiot compared to primitive man.

A revolutionary awareness continued through the 1900s into our present time: there are scientifically proven reasons—and commonsense reasons—that explain why real food feeds the body and why crap does not. You couldn’t read all the material available on this topic—understanding the human body and the causes of health takes a lifetime of discovery.

Before you start, the first thing you need is an educated POV, or point of view. Your POV is a way to discern what information is accurate and what should be dismissed.

Luckily, you don’t have to read all the books available. But you do have to read a few of the right books. You can find them in the SRP Self-Health Starter Kit.

Allow me to summarize the POV you need to find your way through a lifetime of research.

Everything you need to know lies in the answers to the following questions:

What is healthy soil?

What is a healthy plant?

What is nourishing food?

What are nourishing ways to prepare food?

Once you know the answers to these four questions, you’ll have a POV that will guide you like a compass through this lifetime hunt and journey.
Hold on! By now you’re probably asking the following question (or at least you should be):

“If there’s all this information on the causes of health and how nutrition protects the body from disease, why doesn’t everyone eat the right foods?”

Ready for the answer? Because someone smarter than you has already caused you to ask the wrong questions.

The Wrong Questions:

Is it sweet?

Is it cheap?

Can it be shoved directly into my face, or do I have to nuke it first?

Are all my friends eating it?

Does eating or drinking it make me cool?

These questions lead you to the wrong POV. Can you see the difference? Can you see just how powerfully influential junk food and soft drink commercials are? Do you see how well they work? You could stare straight at the most perfect, delicious, life-giving food and never recognize it because you’ve been programmed to eat what you’re told to eat by people who don’t care a whit about you. And the ultimate problem isn’t even the commercials—it’s that you were looking for crap when you should have been looking for food.

How do you plan to turn this around? I have a suggestion: learn the right answers to the Eating Skills Test. SRP has a great community blog. Sign up for a wide range of writers and topics, find real food recipes, and keep moving intelligently through the wilderness.

Meanwhile, to reward you for reading this far, I’ll give you the first lesson you need to get started.

Lesson #1: Hunt for Food, Not Crap

Crap is a substance that looks like food but has no food value. What is food value? Food value is the quality and quantity of nutrients that food carries into the body. You’ve heard them described as vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, enzymes, amino acids, proteins, carbohydrates, fatty acids, and friendly bacteria. But what do these words mean?

These are names given to various nutritional chemical combinations that food contains. Where did the food—say, an apple—get those chemicals? From the tree. Where did the tree get them? From the interaction of water, sun, and soil.

How does the soil get these chemicals? Before they plant a seed, farmers and gardeners must build the dirt with nutrients and composted material to produce living microbes, a process that makes the soil healthy and rich. If the soil contains nutrients, the plants—with the help of water and sunlight—will convert the nutrients into the plant forms of those chemicals. These are also known as plant hormones, or phytonutrients. Human and animals bodies can use them to repair cells, feed skin, fire up the nerves, and sustain other actions necessary to a quality life on earth.

Another characteristic of crap is that it’s not grown in nutrient-rich soil teaming with living organisms. Plants grown on sterilized soil—to which a few synthetic chemicals have been added—will starve your body.

Crap is a substance that, disguised as food, tricks you into feeling you’ve been fed while leaving your cells starved.

Starve those brain cells long enough and you’ll be dull, distracted, and tired. You’ll also have memory problems. Starve the digestive system long enough, and your stomach will no longer produce hydrochloric acid for digestion. Starve your hair, and it’ll fall out. Starve the endocrine cells long enough and you’ll be overweight, maybe obese. You may even be unable to get pregnant or fight infection. You heard me:

Being overweight is a symptom of starvation! In fact, being sick is a symptom of starvation!

Once you learn how to feed yourself correctly, practice feeding yourself correctly, and experience the health benefits of feeding yourself correctly, you’ll be on your way to knowing how to teach someone else. Maybe your future wife or husband, maybe your own son or daughter. Maybe your dog. But one thing is for sure:

Not even your dog will be healthy if you don’t know what healthy food is, and if you don’t know how to use it.

How are you going to learn the right answers to the Eating Skills Test? Not by sitting there with your mouth open, that’s for sure. Get busy and:

Browse the books, ebooks, charts, multimedia, and digital downloads available at Selene River Press.
Check out the SRP Self-Health Starter Kit.
Explore the SRP Historical Archives for free downloadable articles.
Sign up for the SRP Self-Health Nutrition Blog.

And feel free to call me any time: Stephanie Anderson: 866-407-9323.

Happy Hunting!

Bonus Guide: Superior Nutrition Found Here

This Bonus Guide shows you the most nutritionally dense foods ranked in order of the quality and quantity of important nutrient factors. Our country is so blessed with an abundance of quality food choices, but we’ve chosen convenience over real food.

The first nutrition you should seek is healthy protein and fat from healthy animals. Always look for organically and/or locally raised food from animals and plants that lived healthy lives on healthy soil.

I. Protein and Fat