Furthermore, I defend this grocery chain as if I’m related to Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey. I take it personally when people refer to the store as “Whole Paycheck” and I scoff at those who actually think that shopping at Trader Joe’s is comparable. (Clearly they don’t read labels.)

Like any business, particularly forward thinking ones that take risks, Whole Foods is not without its faults. This recent interview with Mackey in USA Today highlights some of the corporation’s biggest blunders in its 30 years, but it also provided a forum for Mackey to answer some burning questions about Whole Foods philosophy. And I have to say, I’m impressed with his answers.

I’m also impressed with his commitment to the lifestyle he sells. He’s a vegan, first off, and when asked: “Wal-Mart now sells more organics than Whole Foods. Does this drive you crazy?” Mackey responds:

They have a lot more stores than we do. … But the fact that Wal-Mart now sells organic food makes me proud. Organic has become mainstream.

Indeed. And in no small part thanks to the efforts and marketing dollars spent by Whole Foods.

Yes, he’s a businessman. And yes, he’s far richer than I.  And yes, there’s probably some PR spin in there. And, no I haven’t hired a private detective to give me the full dirty scoop on John Mackey.

But, I believe this guy wants mainstream America to WAKE UP. Whether they shop at Whole Foods or Wal-mart.

And that’s the kind of guy (and business) I can be proud to be associated with.

(Psst…John Mackey…If you’re reading this and want to hire The Wellness Bitch as your mascot…let’s talk.)

I haven’t seen them in a while so I don’t know if they are still running, but I realized that a similar technique would be a fantastic way to educate parents on the effects of the kind of crap they’re feeding their kids.

THE FOLLOWING COMMERCIAL MESSAGE HAS BEEN SPONSORED BY:

Scene 1: [8-year-old boy eats Fruit by the Foot or some other fake fruit snack]
Scene 2: [Same 8-year-old boy. Now with hair like this: ]

[And eyes bugging out of his head. The boy starts jumping up and down. Then he begins to shake his hands.  His eyes twitch. You think he's doing a cute little dance until he starts bumping into chairs and other nearby children. Then he quite literally starts climbing the walls. He is out of control!]

SCENE 3: WAKE UP CALL!!!! [YOURS TRULY with a bullhorn, perhaps?]

The fact of the matter is, such a commercial would not be far off from the type of marketing crap shown in between your kid’s favorite cartoons. In fact, food companies design commercials with the aim to inspire our children to ask for these snacks…convince them they can possess this type of “high energy” and prowess. Emphasis on possessed.

In this real life commercial below, the kid eats an Airhead and his head explodes. He is, as the announcer narrates, ”extremely out of control.”

Which, if you think about it, is kinda…true.

A lot.

Let me give you a random sampling of search string terms people use to find us:

Mucousy poop

Shitting like crazy

Foul-smelling shit

Dairy and gluten make me crap all the time

Runny shit after eating McDonald’s

Shit your brains out

Shit in mouth (Now, I really don’t know why you are searching this or how The Wellness Bitch applies, but WELCOME!)

Isn’t Google awesome? You can find anything and anyone on the Internet. Community is everything nowadays.

Just think. For years, we were all shitting our brains out, yet none of us could figure out why or communicate with each other. Doctors didn’t know what to do with us beyond prescribing innards twisting meds or sending us to a shrink. You thought you were alone and crazy. Or a freak of nature. You avoided cheese and crowded trains and eating cheese on crowded trains.

But, now you have a resource and a friend in The Wellness Bitch.

Don’t be embarrassed or afraid. I don’t know your name or where you live.

All I know is that pooping is often a painful process for you. But help is on the way. Continue sifting through this blog. Something will likely resonate and put you on a path to a less painful, less stinky tomorrow.

Unless you want to know more about “shit in mouth.” That I can’t help you with.

Is there a psychologist, sociologist, or behaviorist that can explain this to me?

A friend of mine struggled with his inability to motivate for years until he got a diabetes diagnosis. Now, a few months later he is in amazing shape and on a strict diet and workout regimen.

Another person I know quit smoking when she had a cervical cancer scare. She tested positive for the HPV virus and quit smoking cold turkey on the spot.

This is not uncommon. I’m sure you’re familiar with this exact type of situation or you know someone who is.

The other day a Facebook friend posted a link to this story, an “Eco-Alert” quoting a renowned virologist, Frank Fenner, who thinks it’s very likely

humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change 

Yikes! This guy is no looney conspiracy theorist, either, apparently. He oversaw the eradication of smallpox, for crying out loud.

As a not-so-in-the-closet catastrophist, I took this blog post very seriously. But I feel fairly paralyzed as to what I can do about it.

I’m just little old me and despite doing the best I can to WAKE PEOPLE UP, combined with a strong personal effort to treat the planet and my fellow man with kindness, people just don’t seem to get it. It’s as if the majority of our friends and countrymen are waiting to hear the president in the form of Morgan Freeman get on the TV and announce an asteroid is coming before they actually TAKE THIS CRISIS SERIOUSLY.

The article concludes:

While many scientists are also pessimistic, others are more optimistic. Among the latter is a colleague of Professor Fenner, retired professor Stephen Boyden, who said he still hopes awareness of the problems will rise and the required revolutionary changes will be made to achieve ecological sustainability. “While there’s a glimmer of hope, it’s worth working to solve the problem. We have the scientific knowledge to do it but we don’t have the political will,” Boyden said.

When we get to the place where a scientist thinks there’s only a “glimmer” of hope, we’re a breath away from crisis.

Consider yourself diagnosed.

How do you get 560 calories into a 16 ounce drink? That takes the talent of a major global corporation: McDonald’s (of course).

The McDonald’s Frappe՛is on billboards, on the radio, on the internet, and I even heard they were giving out FREE ones at my local McD’s.

How is a girl supposed to avoid all that advertising?

I succumbed one day when my kids asked to go to the famous McD’s play space. It is a rare treat, and I get to listen to traffic while they scream delightedly at going down a long covered slide.

Also, I wanted to try this Frappe՛. I figured I needed a coffee and it was my snack time. Usually, my snack time has about 100 to 200 calories depending on how hungry I am and what I had for lunch. When I asked at the counter, they didn’t know how many calories were in the Frappe՛(and they didn’t know what was in it).

It tasted delicious. The mixologists at McDonald’s really know their stuff. When I came home, I checked the calorie content and was absolutely blown away. 560 CALORIES, 24 GRAMS OF FAT, 70 GRAMS OF SUGAR – wow!

Honestly, I thought I was ordering a coffee drink with some added sugar – not a CREAM drink with some added coffee!!!!

The second ingredient in a McD’s Frappe is cream.  I looked on their website. And, it takes talent to get high fructose corn syrup listed 3 times on an ingredient list.

My advice is to stay FAR AWAY from the Frappe and stick with coffee.

Lisa Cain, Ph.D. writes about healthy snacks on Snack-Girl.com. She is a published author, mother of two, and an avid snacker

That the poor are so desperate to feed their families, that they have no other choice than to buy cheap imitation grape drink and Dollar Store brand cheese doodles. That the poor don’t have the benefit of spending time in Barnes and Noble browsing through Michael Pollan books. That the poor are so tired from working two jobs that they can’t summon up the strength to do more than throw some canned franks and beans into a pot to warm.

I’d like to know how those people– those compassionate champions of the working poor — how do they explain it when middle class Americans…or even upper class americans with nannies and luxury cars …make those same choices? Because they do. I see it all the time.

I walk into a $1 million home to pick up my kid from a playdate and find him eating rainbow goldfish crackers.

I see nannies pushing overweight kids in stroller. And moms in designer shoes handing their two-year-olds mocha frappaccinos to sip on.

I’m not a cold-hearted bitch. But I don’t think eating or living well really takes much money, brains, or higher education. Clearly, if that’s all it took, we wouldn’t be seeing commercials for Abilify, alongside ones for Macy’s One Day Sale.

Hey. Come a little closer. I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

I’m not rich. I put on a good show with my nice house and leased mini-van. My kids in their hand-me-down Old Navy clothes. My mock designer hand bag from Target.

But we’re struggling. We have debt. We count our pennies.

I don’t have the money for a gym membership or a trainer or even to go to weekly yoga classes. I take books out of the library or buy them second hand on Ebay.

But don’t cry for me. And don’t think I’m complaining that my life is so hard.

But, I think that bad lifestyle choices aren’t reserved for the poor.

And it’s about time we stop having that conversation and move on. Frankly, it bores me.

Your sympathy and your outrage would be better spent WAKING UP our government. And our schools. And your neighbors.

“I really try to be a courteous smoker,” Ms. Greene said. “If I’m smoking a cigarette on the street and run into a friend, I won’t have them stand downwind.”

That sounds nice enough, right? Courteousness is definitely a good quality in a friend.

However, the paragraph on Ms. Greene continues:

If someone is visiting her apartment who does not like cigarettes, she does not light one. “I use Febreze all the time,” she said, “on the rugs and on the furniture.”

Man, if the smokes won’t kill her, the Febreze might. I don’t even want to think about the inside of that woman’s lungs.

I don’t really bitch about smokers very often. I think I have a fondness for them, despite the health implications of their habit. I remember what it was like to stand outside my NYC office building, light up, and people watch.  Doesn’t mean I still do it.

She doesn’t know why she smokes. She likes it. What more is there?

I’d feel a lot better about the statement if Ms. Greene was choosing to smoke because she likes it. As opposed to not really knowing why she does it.  So many of the gripes I have with people making bad choices is when they act like they don’t know, as opposed to “don’t care.”

* * * *

Isn’t it amazing how a smear campaign against cigarettes and smokers managed to get a nation to change their habits and accept smoking-related laws that a decade ago would have been laughed out of court?

See what a little shame can do? (That and high taxes.)

What will it take for people to start looking at junk food the same way they view cigarettes? Is it possible that in five, ten years we might see doughnuts banned from the workplace? Sodas chucked out of stadiums?

And, miracles of miracles, Jello and fruit punch eliminated from our school lunches?

We’d hear the same cries of personal freedom and privacy that came out of the mouth of smokers a decade ago. But, if we could hold out…who knows how far we could go?

I know if confronted, she’d compare her morning cola to the cup of coffee that her workmates drink. (As long as she didn’t tell me to go fuck myself instead.) And, it’s true: Coffee (particularly the average 7-eleven or Dunkin Donuts variety,with a splenda thrown in) is not that much better at all.

Now that we agree, I really need to WAKE YOU UP to the fact that you are not getting your work day off to a great start with a chemical cocktail of aspartame and caramel color.

Want to know why you’re known as the bitch around the office? Why you feel cranky at 10 am? Perhaps your job sucks. Your boss is an ass, and all that jazz.

But trust me, if you started your day off with sauteed spinach and garlic, with turkey bacon thrown in (like I did!), your shitty job and boss might look just a little bit better.

As I started to become more aware of the type of shit that contaminates our world, I started making changes to my life and household. For instance, I like a clean toilet. I have a very sensitive sniffer and it doesn’t require a large volume of poorly aimed pee drops around the toilet before the bathroom smells like urine to me. 

Back in the old days, I loved the way Mr. Bubbles foamed when you sprayed it on the seat and I loved the lemony fresh scent. When I wiped away the foam, my toilet felt clean to me…almost instantly.

But when I realized my son would come into the bathroom after Mr. Bubbles and start coughing, I started doing some research on the internet and realized these cleaning products were contributing to his asthma.

That’s how the greening of my home started. Not because of an innate love of our planet. Not because of a life-long commitment to plants, animals, and all things the Lord hath created. Not out of a fear of global warming.

Plain and simple. Switching from toxic cleansers to non-toxic cleansers made my life easier. It meant less coughing and less asthma which meant less nebulizer which meant less steroids which meant lower costs AND less jumping on the couch and less time outs.

People naturally assume that because I care about my health, that I’m “green.” And in some ways they are right. The way I choose to feed myself and my family; the way I choose which products I will buy for my home; or the way I treat my yard…all these choices (which I make out of a commitment to wellness for my family) also benefit the Earth.

But there are things that I do that are so eco-unfriendly, you might stop liking me if you knew. So I will only tell you one — I love paper towels. And I use them in abundance. Particularly to clean snot and food off my kids’ faces.

I make a commitment to you that when all of my children pass the age of five, I will no longer buy paper towels. But from now until then…I guess I’m just a phony. Or at least a work in progress. Just like you.

Start small. You never know what might happen to you along the way.

But, really an epidemic is an illness (or anything really) that is widely prevalent or spreading rapidly.

I first heard the term epidemic used in conjunction with childhood chronic illness when a friend recommended Dr. Kenneth Bock’s book, “Healing the New Childhood Epidemics: Autism, ADHD, Asthma & Allergies.” His explanation of why and how these illnesses are becoming epidemic really made sense. And turned me into a bitch on a mission.

I want people to start friggin’ listening to parents who know that something is wrong with their kid.

And I want the people in charge to start taking these epidemics seriously the way they would a mass influenza outbreak. I’m not looking for masks and yellow jackets, per say. But a pamphlet or a PSA would be nice. Or how about a statement from the AMA or the AAP?

Recently, I started reading a new book on the subject: “A Compromised Generation: The Epidemic of Chronic Illness in America’s Children” by Beth Lambert. I’m still only in the introduction, but already the author has shared a really, relevant, and aptly stated WAKE UP CALL:

All children exhibit occasional temper tantrums, hoarding of toys, constipation, and hyperactivity… However, it is not normal when children exhibit any of these symptoms chronically or with particular intensity and severity…

Below is a partial list of the 50 or so symptoms Beth Lambert includes in her book that, if occuring with regularity, should serve as WAKE UP CALLS for parents and practitioners.  So many people I know (including the best and brightest doctors) tell me that the symptoms below are not a big deal. And, as the author says, “because these are normal child behaviors they are often dismissed.” Personally, I have been dismissed by my child’s doctor for colic, IBS, gas, runny stools, heartburn, and eczema.

Which of these symptoms has your child’s doctor pooh-poohed?

• Red cheeks after eating
• Chronic runny nose or cough
• Red or hot ears after eating
• Chronic or recurrent ear infections
• Chronic strep or sinus infections
• Frequent diaper rashes in babies
• Cavities or excessive tartar, or bad breath despite proper dental hygiene
• Dark circles or bags under eyes
• Mood swings
• Tummy aches
• Distended pot belly
• Constipation
• Excessive gas or flatulence
• White coating on the tongue
• Frequent loose stools
• Recurrent urinary tract infections or yeast infections
• Excessive hyperactivity
• Sensory seeking behavior” always looking to crash into people, objects

WAKE UP. All are potential symptoms of a bigger deal. Just because they have become so prevalent, doesn’t mean they are normal.