Does Eating Like Crap Make You Sick?
February 26, 2021 by Kristy
My daughter, Gwen, has this weird rash she gets on her arm, well the inside of her elbow to be exact. I know it isn’t the laundry soap, we don’t use fabric softener. We have eliminated almost all chemicals in our house over the last five or so years (I will talk about that awakening in a different blog post). But every now and then her rash pops up again. It has never been diagnosed by a doctor but I am certain that it is eczema. She has had it since she was way little and my oldest son, Riley also had it on and off as a child.
Riley did have eczema diagnosed by a doctor and I was given a prescription cream to put on it. The cream contained a steroid and even before I educated myself on the dangers of man-made medicines, I had a gut feeling to not use it on him. For Riley, that was when I switched over to a laundry soap free of all fillers, dyes and fragrances as well as eliminate fabric softener. That one small thing seemed to help with Riley’s eczema. Riley didn’t live with us when he decided to eat better. As a kid I failed him because he was fed the “traditional American Diet”, of cereals, fast food and whatever was convenient. I have learned so much on my journey and I often wonder if Riley would be AS disabled if I would have fed him better.
A few years ago Gwen was really a picky eater. She has never liked meat and she has always been attracted to grains. She also has a sweet tooth, like her Dad. There were many dinners that she refused to eat. We started to take notice that her rash would get worse when she wasn’t eating vegetables and fruits. The amazing thing I should actually clarify is that SHE started to take notice that her rash would get worse when she wasn’t eating fruits and vegetables.
I have a very good friend that is a breast cancer survivor. She has become a lot more plant based since overcoming and beating her cancer diagnosis. One day we were working together on something for the youth in our church group. She refused to get a brownie with ice cream at the end of the activity. She simply said, “I have noticed after I eat things with a lot of sugar in them, I just really don’t feel that good”.
So, my question is, does eating like crap make you sick? You all know me well enough to know what I am going to say, but lets look at some articles written by other people to answer that question.
An article on shape.com titled, 7 Surprising Ways Junk Food Makes You Miserable, states that Yes you don’t feel well when you don’t eat well. Another article I found states this, “What we put into our bodies plays a huge role in how we feel day in and day out, for a wide variety of reasons.” The last article I am going to reference for you goes as far as to say that you do start to have problems as early as within five days of eating junk food and that it begins to impair memory function, attention, and mood. This last article also correlates skin conditions and poor eating habits.
It sounds like eating the right things is important. Why isn’t this discussed? I hope to shed a light so that as Mom’s and Dad’s when we take our kids in to the doctor, this conversation can change from prescribing a horrible steroid cream to discussing how many fruits and vegetables your kid eats.
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