Why Can’t I Get My Family Dump The Processed Foods?
By April. Filed in Eating, Living |Tags: big berkey, bromine, family, fluoride, food additives, Food Additives: A Shoppers Guide to What's Safe and What's Not, food inc, gatorade, Help, lucuma, maca, processed foods, safe food
Do you have relatives you’d like to see eat healthier but they just laugh at your ways and mock you? Do they even go as far as to suggest that you might be lacking something in you or your children’s diet? Trust me, I know what it’s like.
We have been off the packaged foods for years now. We do buy occasional packaged foods like dried fruits and so forth but not often and they have natural ingredients in them, no chemicals. Aside from my long-term food storage, I only have two small cupboards for food in the kitchen. These are home to all of my seeds, chia, herbs, spices, teas and powders like lucuma and maca so you see we are not heavy on the packaged foods. I could use a bigger fridge for all of the produce though!
When I try to tell some of my family how bad some of the packaged foods I see them consuming are, I get so frustrated when they don’t seem to get it. Why would they want to drink soda or Gatorade with bromine in it (an endocrine disruptor used as a fire-retardant and found in many foods other than soda) or eat foods loaded with genetically modified grains and nitrates? It took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t that they didn’t love me or trust what I was telling them but it was that THEY DIDN’T ACQUIRE THE INFORMATION ON THEIR OWN.
I know from my personal Facebook, where I have my bubble of like-minded friends, that I’m not the only one who repeatedly tries to help my family get off these deadly foods. I’m also not the only one who fails over and over and has to watch them suffer through illnesses caused by poor nutrition and exposure to toxins.
We’ve established part of the problem. So they didn’t acquire the information themselves, but why then don’t they want to? Something has to happen in their lives to break their trust in what is “normal.” The “everybody else is doing it reasoning” finally doesn’t work for them. Either their doctors fail them or they figure out that the path they are on is only making them sicker. We cannot force this to happen for them. They have to come to it on their own just like we did. That may never happen if they don’t get off the fluoride though, eeek! You may need to get them a Berkey Water Filter! Half joking there, but fluoride seriously has been proven to make people docile and indifferent.
One of the first books I bought to help myself (about 5-6 years ago) before I saw any of the movies like Food Inc. was Food Additives: A Shoppers Guide to What’s Safe and What’s Not. Something changes when you personally go through the products that you would normally put into your cart. Then you see those crazy ingredients that you can barely pronounce and you find that they are full of dangerous carcinogens that cause asthma, nausea, headaches, mammary tumors in mice, kidney problems, cancer in rats and many other crazy side effects. One by one you start eliminating things. It’s because you are the one learning it and someone isn’t telling you what to do.
I’ll admit the “badger them with information,” approach has worked on a couple of my family members. Oddly enough it was the top two who are the closest to me. I think that may have something to do with it but not entirely. Yes, they respect my opinion and realize I am concerned about them from a place of love but of course it’s not going to happen this way for everyone. Everyone’s relationships are different. I also bought the book above for both of them too. Maybe that was part of it.
The best way to help a family member is to gently provide them with information like movies articles and books if they’ll read them, feed them healthy foods when they visit your home and be patient with them. Don’t ever give up though. They are listening in their own ways. Make sure you find a supportive community like we have here at Primitive Mommy. It helps so much to surround yourself with like-minded people, even if your only option is online.
This is my brother drinking a green juice. He stopped eating many processed foods over the past few years. He also stopped drinking Gatorade and Propel and started drinking lemon water instead. He listens to me. 
