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One of the things I am very conscious of in doing this work, is that the recommendations we make on this blog have the potential to have consequences far beyond then plates of our actual readers.
We are approaching 10,000 page reads a month, and our readers come from some pretty surprising places like India, Uzbekistan, and Trinidad. I am honored and flattered to know that the information we provide here is popular and useful to a variety of women. I do not want anyone to think that because they do not live where I do, that they cannot be healthy with PCOS. Or, that if they do not have the money for some Amazon-based supplement, they cannot be healthy with PCOS.
That being said, I am ever-mindful of the collective consequence of 1 in 5 women all rushing out to buy something because they read about it on this blog. That is why you never see me parrot, repeat, or retweet those lists of top ten healthy foods. While salmon, blueberries, and walnuts are all healthy, they are not available to many of our readers. And even to those who are, they are not the most environmentally friendly choices to make.
There simply are not enough wild salmon on the planet for it to be feasible for nutrition experts to be promoting the idea that this is the only fish that you should eat for omega-3 fatty acids. I LOVE blueberries, but I live in a hot climate where they do not grow, and the carbon footprint of the ones that make it to my local store…well…just not something I want to sign off on as my personal contribution to environmental disruption.
The other trend I see is a tendency to believe that if the food or supplement did not come from some exotic Amazon river tributary, or if it was not handpicked by an esoteric band of Mongolian monks, it can't have health value. We are sick in the Northern hemisphere, so our answer lies outside of our own environment, right?
Not quite.
One of the reasons we are sick, is that we have made our environment sick. We are all simply artifacts and consequences of our sick environment. Clean up the way we grow and produce food, reduce our carbon footprint, and we become healthy as a natural consequence of living responsibly.
Rather than jumping over foods in your own backyard, or buying into the idea that your answer is growing on some mountainside in Kenya, take a look at your immediate environment. How much fresh food are you eating? How much of it is locally grown? How much is seasonal?
Do you even know what foods are in season right now? I was floored when I used to do grocery store tours at Whole Foods several years ago. The people coming through those classes, in Tempe, AZ, and Venice, CA, were pretty well educated, and they viewed themselves as environmentally conscious.
But invariably, I would take them into the produce section and say,"Now tell me what's in season." And they would look at me like a deer in the headlights. In the middle of winter they would gravitate toward the blueberries shipped in from South America. And in the Arizona classes, they had no idea our perfectly healthy nuts are pecans and pistachios, not walnuts.
(Psssssttttt…by the way, what is in season is usually what's in the biggest bin at the lowest price, in case you were curious).
Back to blueberries. Turns out, one of the reasons blueberries are such an incredible powerhouse, is exactly why desert-friendly foods are also pretty incredible. If you would like to learn more, check out my blog post for Chow Locally this week. Take a look at what Mother Nature may have planted right in your own backyard before you get in a hurry to spend a lot of money on some food or supplement that comes from exotic, faraway land.
Much of what modern medicine tries to do, is OUTSMART Mother Nature. I believe the more logical, effective, and sustainable answer, especially for PCOS, is to LISTEN to Mother Nature. Her lessons are not the loudest ones, and they are not always on a prominent website, with a strong profit margin, but they are powerful, and they are valuable.
If you have questions about what might be lurking in your part of the world, pass them along! I'd love to learn along with you.