Be a Picky Eater

December 11, 2017 Off By Deby Jizi

“I tell you honestly what I think is the cause of the complicated maladies of the human race: it is their gormandizing and stuffing, and stimulating their digestive organs to an excess, thereby producing nervous disorders and irritation.”~John Abernethy (1764–1831)

Oddly enough, this is not a blog post about food. It is about consuming, which of course includes food, but food is not all that we consume.

Sometimes it may seem that the world is the way it is, and we are at its mercy, but that is not the truth. We make choices every single day about what we eat, drink, listen to, and consume through our eyes.

We don’t have to eat the Standard American Diet (or SAD as it is most aptly called).

We don’t have to drink lots of caffeinated beverages, full of additives, sugar, and artificial chemicals that don’t belong in the human body.

We don’t have to listen to a certain kind of music, or even to other people who chatter away about things we don’t agree with or want to hear.

Most importantly, we don’t have to watch 24 hour news.

So much has changed in the news arena in the past 30 years. With the advent of CNN, the first 24 hour news channel, America went from 30 minutes of local news and 30 minutes of world news every evening from 6-7 pm, with a smattering of morning news on the morning talk shows, to 24 hour, 7 day a week news.

Other channels followed CNN, and here we are with 23 additional hours of news everyday.

The problem is there isn’t enough news to fit all 24 hours without lots of repetition. Lots of it. I challenge anyone reading this to take a tally of what is actually filling those 24 hours.

Mostly, a day of 24 hour news consists of maybe 5 or 6 news stories replaying between literally dozens of advertisements played again and again and again.

Why is this a problem?

Because we become flooded with the negativity of a single story if we hear it over and over. The same story told by different people, giving different angles, all to fill all of that empty air time. What that does to us is fill our minds with the negative.

Yes, bad things happen, but if we watch the news all of the time, we watch and listen to bad things happen repeatedly, and even though there is often only one incident, our minds are filled with the ghastly repetition of one bad thing that has become an enormously bad thing.

That is simplifying it a bit, but it does matter what we put into our minds as well as our bodies.

I don’t need to see someone shot to know how horrible it is. In fact, we are becoming too accustomed to watching people being gunned down. How many videos taken by bystanders of innocent people being shot will it take for us to change gun laws or to train our law enforcement officers new methods?

I have taken to listening to the news on the radio. What is important gets through. I read the paper, online, but I don’t inundate myself by reading everything written about an incident.

We can become mindful consumers of the news. I believe it is imperative that we do. Many of the college students I teach say they don’t believe anyone anymore when it comes to news. This is a direct reaction to too much news and too little time to process it. If they keep it coming, we feel flooded and unable to analyze what we are hearing and seeing.

So I challenge readers to become picky consumers of the news. That doesn’t mean to plunk down in front of a favorite channel. It does help to check out different points of view.

It means to stop overdoing it. I have, and it has made a big difference in my mood. I stay in touch, but I don’t allow myself to be hijacked by news organizations that are struggling to fill 24 hours of airtime between a lucrative advertising business.

Peace and Joy,