My very first job was working at a pet store in the middle of a shopping mall where I learned to care for many different kinds of animals, reptiles, birds, fish etc. I had a friend who came in the store to visit me and ended up purchasing a ball python, a very common type of pet snake. A few weeks later I visited my friend and his new pet.  I had seen so many different things working at that pet shop but as I stood in front of that snake’s tank I witnessed something I’d never seen before. Scattered across the wood chips on the bottom of tank were Cheerios and old, dried up pieces of lettuce.

When I asked my friend about the cereal and lettuce in the snake’s cage he said he didn’t want to feed the snake mice but wanted to feed it what he himself ate.  What my friend didn’t realize is that a python cannot live on a human diet just as a human couldn’t live well on a diet of live mice. Each species is intricately designed for its proper natural diet, from its teeth to its digestive juices, stomach and intestines, on and on. This is why any creature removed from its proper wild diet over time will feel the effects of this denial of nourishment that it needs. We humans often do this withholding of a natural diet to our pets as well as some zoo animals. And yet the creatures we deny proper nourishment most often are ourselves.

It is not about a diet being right or wrong, there is no wrong. It is simply about being properly educated about what your body is set up to digest best: what will allow you to take in the most energy with the least amount of effort.  When properly educated you can choose to follow these principles every time you eat or not, and more importantly, you begin to understand why you feel differently when you eat one thing versus another. This practice begins to demystify things that were once veiled in mystery like allergies and ill-health.

When you begin to understand the effects things like genetic modification of a large part of the world’s food supply and the fact that many of  standard daily allowances for meat and dairy were originally conceived and later perpetuated by the meat and dairy industry, then you can really begin to see the obvious differences between what humans need to thrive and what they choose to consume. Even standards like the now antiquated “food pyramid” and height and weight charts were created by insurance companies.

The sad part is, I think, that most of the poor nutrition and health choices in the world come from people being improperly educated about how to take care of themselves. I really think that if people understood how to truly care for their bodies they would make different choices for themselves, or at least when they chose things that may be less healthy for their bodies, they would do so consciously and understand the consequences that might (I would say may no might) occur.