Throwing the Beans Out With the Bathwater

Things were ok until rumors started going around that eating fat made you fat.

Suddenly America exploded (blew up?). The experts had told us to eat lots of bread and fat-free sugar instead. Of course, most literate people or people with half an ear now know that all that bread and pasta and fat-free sugar-laden snacks make you fat, not fat. (One exception is Subway restaurants, who still tout "low fat! low fat!" sandwiches with massive amounts of bread.)

We followed their advice. We also followed other advice: First eating eggs and other cholesterol-filled foods caused high cholesterol levels; now they're suggesting that eating cholesterol doesn't raise blood cholesterol levels but rather almost the opposite. Saturated fat used to be horrible for you, now it's noted that it's necessary to absorb calcium and even keep your colon healthy. Living enzymes in raw food is one of the latest promotions, but other studies show that the only reason raw food has lots of living enzymes is that raw food is harder for the body to digest and therefore requires more enzymes. Eight glasses of water were necessary because our thirst indicators are unreliable, then some found people didn't need so much after all (although I think I may be finally convinced I need more than I do drink) and we were shown how people actually died from drinking too much water. (You can find anything online, even that water and the usually inoffensive honey are dangerous.)

Now whole grains are bad in that the phytic acids they contain deplete the body of minerals; but wait, only improperly processed whole-grains (like we eat out here in the West). Basically, it boils down to this: Americans have no clue how to eat anymore. How has it gotten to be so difficult to do something as basic as eating?!?

Oh, is that why...?

I once wrote:

I am often leery of writing anything of what might be called substance because I am so often wrong. I'll read a book and murmur, "Oh....yes...yes..." then read a opposing review on the book and realize, "Oh...yes...I missed that. Ah, indeed!” It’s not just the backlash and derision I’m scared of -- although that itself is certainly cause for hesitancy -- but of being wrong. And by that I don't mean just the possibility of misleading people, but being wrong in and of itself. Integrity involves wanting to do right because it is right; not to be superior, not to prove a point, but because right is right.

Today I saw:

A major concern for INTPs is the haunting sense of impending failure. They spend considerable time second-guessing themselves. The open-endedness (from Perceiving) conjoined with the need for competence (NT) is expressed in a sense that one's conclusion may well be met by an equally plausible alternative solution, and that, after all, one may very well have overlooked some critical bit of data. An INTP arguing a point may very well be trying to convince himself as much as his opposition.

While I almost always score as an INFJ on those types of quizzes, and much of an INTP's description is totally unlike me, my written paragraph is essentially a paraphrase of the latter description paragraph. I thought it was a matter of integrity and now I find it's a matter of type (and a previously unknown type, or half-type, at that). Or is it? Did I score that way because of my aims toward integrity?

The application of such goes much deeper than just the "I'm like this" aspect, but I need to wrestle with these thoughts more before articulating them. I guess such wrestling is a lifelong doom.

______________________________________

p.s. The fact that it took me a good portion of an hour to get that last paragraph right is a telling sign. Or is it just that I'm a writer who needs to get her words just right...?