Food & Wellness Experts - To Believe or Not?

When feeling your best now and into the future is a core goal of your health and food research, you'll be wise to watch out for a common pitfall.

Praised or Shamed for Our Beliefs:

It's very common to think we must choose to believe or disbelieve something we hear. Whether this is a human trait or a trait of our current culture doesn't really matter. It's promoted even in the way we talk to each other.

We'll hear something really interesting and share it with our friends. If they like the idea, and believe it, they'll praise you for it.

But if it's something controversial, or a point of view that you hadn't considered before, when you share it your friends attack you. It's common for them to react negatively to you, the messenger, and not the topic itself. Such as with statements like, "You're not one of those anti-XXXers, are you?" or, "You're stupid if you believe that!" or, "Everyone knows that's not true, what's wrong with you?"

Even if the reaction is less strong, it often still has an undertone of being derogatory, or they'll shame you a bit for what you shared. Maybe it's in the tone of their voice, or a look on their face. You get the message that you shouldn't believe whatever interesting thing you shared, and that you should actually disbelieve it.

The core of this is that we get the message that we must either believe or disbelieve things.

Discussion Not Allowed:

What flows from this is that discussion will not occur. Why discuss something we believe? We already believe it, everyone else should believe it too, what's there to talk about?

Why discuss something we don't believe? We already know it's not true, everyone else should disbelieve it too, what's there to talk about?

When we discount having open discussions, we can miss absolutely critical information. We miss learning about things we didn't know, or being able to inform others about details they hadn't considered before.

This trait of believing and disbelieving things is also used as a tool of people with an agenda, and of propaganda. If someone has an agenda that can be argued against and shown to be invalid, they don't want anyone having open discussions about it. When they construct their agenda, they'll also construct a variety of slogans to go along with it, that's promoted as an alternative to any legitimate rebuttal.

If you're reading this in 2020 then you REALLY know there's lots of slogans being thrown around in hundreds of different ways. These slogans didn't come out of thin air. They were created when the agenda was created. There simply is no way that the same slogans appear in the same couple days, in hundreds of countries around the world, from out of nothing. Especially when they're pure "double think."

These kinds of slogans are designed to stop any discussion in it's tracks. We're just supposed to believe or disbelieve them, and not question them. And we will be shamed and even "cancelled" by our friends and family.

The food and health field are filled with the same kinds of slogans, and discussion is not allowed in many topics. This has not happened over night. It took a long, long time to get to the current state.

Emotionally Invested in Our Beliefs:

Another thing that happens when be believe or disbelieve things is that we become emotionally invested in our beliefs. Much of that stems from how others react to our beliefs. We connect our beliefs to our value as a person. We get praised by our friends, family and peers for having certain beliefs. Changing our beliefs is often out of the question. We know we'll get a lot of backlash if we change our beliefs.

Changing our beliefs also means that we have to admit we were wrong. This is very difficult to do, especially on highly emotional topics. There are repercussions for being wrong, whether real or imagined. Many people simply don't want to change, it's too difficult and painful.

There may not be much we can do about how the world is in this regard, but there is something we can do to how we deal with this kind of information.

An Alternative Method of Dealing with Beliefs:

The health, food and nutrition fields are huge industries, with lots of people with competing and oppisite agendas. We can figure out what some of them are, but in reality there are many topics that no one knows the true agenda. There's also many agendas that aren't secret, but if we haven't dug deep into the topic, we have no idea what they are. We may think it's one things, but the history and evidence show something completely different.

That's why I encourage people to not believe or disbelieve what they hear and learn about health, food and nutrition. When we acknowledge that we don't know everything, we can simply take the info we have so far, and stick it on the "Info Pile." We may choose to act on the current info we have, but if we learn something new, we can adjust what we're doing.

When we remove the belief / disbelief requirement we're able to look at things more from a logic perspective, and not an emotional perspective. We can take the info we know at this moment, and choose to act on it, and even to not act on it. We may find out info that we don't know what to do with. It's perfectly fine to just add it to the info pile. We may learn something in the future that can put it into context.

One big reason for taking this attitude is that we should be measuring our health by how we actually feel. We can hear a ton of so called experts tell us something is good for us, but it means nothing if it makes us feel sick. There's a lot of agendas that are very loud, with hundreds of so called experts telling us it's the truth, but in reality it's not true.

When we stop listening to how we feel, and rely only on outside experts, we miss one of the most important tools that will help us improve our overall health and well being.

Learning is great, especially when we're open to competing and contradictory info, and being able to get some perspective on the true options. We can then make informed decisions we can try. And as we learn more, we can adjust and alter our course, and decide for ourselves if we're moving in the right direction.

If eating good whole food is on your radar of things to adjust, or simply to try some new things, be sure to check out our Recipes section, where you're bound to find something you like.

Learn, eat and enjoy!

Thora