You Are What You Eat? Uh-Oh.

This morning was a regular morning. Some catching up on office gossip. Checking in on some of my favorite college basketball discussion forums. Reading through last night’s work emails.

And then I made the mistake of opening my Gmail. The first note was from my wife, with a link to this article about the foods farmers will sell you, but won’t eat themselves. The premise of the article is that you never know what food you’ve been eating every week for years will suddenly be discovered to cause some horrible disease.

It’s even worse when you find out that the food is something you feed your kids every week. Which is what happened to me this morning.

Thanks to this article I will now be soaking beans from a bag, not popping open a can. Tomatoes will have to come from a glass jar – if I can even find them distributed this way. My apples and my potatoes will be organic or they won’t be in my fridge.

And forget about microwave popcorn. That’s right. Microwave popcorn is out.

Wellness has a great deal to do with making choices. Choices that will help you be physically healthy and mentally well. But these days, as we learn more and more about the unintended consequences of industrialized food, I’m finding that some of my most consequential choices are the ones I didn’t even know I was making. Which is really stressful. And stress isn’t good either.

So today I’m once again reminding myself – as every parent must do pretty much every day of their life – that there’s only so much I can do. And the rest will just have to work itself out. It’s not an easy thing to get used to, but accepting that there’s very little I can actually control has been a big part of my personal wellness.

I am going to miss microwave popcorn. At least until 2015.

Hope this finds you well.

Jacob Braude

VP, Strategic Planner