I went to a health food store for the first time on Saturday. I went in expecting a co-op stocked top to bottom with generic products in unbleached paper bags. I was surprised on many counts.
First, the store had an ambience although it was unsurprisingly of an eco-friendly nature. Secondly, the store had a lot of top-shelf products in standard packaging. I was able to find a lot of good indian, thai, middle-east products. In hindsight it makes sense, but I was still surprised. I also found products like micro-brewed ginger ale that were quite good even without the health angle.
But the biggest surprise was the people. They were universally pale, sallow, listless and skinny. Everybody there, customers and employees, looked like they were just recovering from a months-long illness. At 5’5" I’m short, muscular, and slightly fat. I’m not used to being the big guy in any particular crowd. But at that place I felt like a tank amongst volvos.
Shouldn’t the customers in a health food store look, you know, healthy?
The employees at our health food store look healthy. Nobody’s gaunt, nobody’s pale unless they’re fair skinned. A couple of the people in the vitamin section work out. A lot of them do yoga. Most, if not all of them, maintain a healthy balance between what they sell and what most of the rest of us eat (meat, dairy, etc.)
The owner is tall and thin and is in fabulous shape for his age. He’s very adamant about people not looking like “sickies”.
That’s why you shouldn’t patronize the health-food store run by vampires. I mean, duh.
(In seriousness, the local health food co-op that I frequent is staffed mostly by 1) youngish guys that look like they do competitive bicycle racing, and 2) sturdy old Russian women. I think your store is an outlier.)
Definately an oddball experience. I was in the Whole Foods in Boulder over the weekend and it’s like you’ve wandered into a Hollywood production. Hardbodies everywhere in spandex. I think mine was the only car in the parking lot without a kayak or mountain bike strapped to it.
The other health food stores around are similar, although that one stands out above the others.
Maybe it was an off day for that store. Of course, down here in geriatrica, it’s hard to find a surplus of fit, healthy folks in any store. If you all could ship some of those spandexed hardbodied ladies down here, I’d appreciate it.
Pale and skinny is a healthy way to go through life. When you see someone who is at an ideal weight for their height, they look thin. And staying out of the sun reduces your risk of skin cancer.
You may be thinking of ‘fit’ as ‘healthy’. We think of a fit person as being muscular and tan from doing lots of outdoor activities. Big men often look fit because their basic body shape is pretty much the same whether they have big muscles or some extra fat.
Having bigger muscles doesn’t automatically make someone healthier. A slender person who does aerobic activies like running or swimming may have a better cardiovascular system than someone who lifts weights. The weightlifter is probably stronger, but that doesn’t mean they will necessarily live longer than the person who does more aerobic activities.
I wondered that myself. I work in a co-op and I’ve been accused of being anorexic and pale, but I’m a natural redhead (so I wisely stay out of the sun) and I’m not overly thin by a long shot. It’s just a matter of reference.
The vast majority of my friends, acquaintances, and coworkers are pale, too. When you live down here in Southwest FLA, you stay inside as much as possible. As for overweight, yeah, I meet a lot of folks who are either fat or muscular. So my perception is probably skewed.
Still, the folks at the store did not look healthy.
What a coincidence, I went to a health food store for the first time this Saturday too! I felt like a total hippie.
There was a guy working there that looked like he belonged in the 60’s and looked emancipated like as if he were a vegan. He freaked me out a bit because of how fragile he seemed. I race with cyclists and this guy makes us look muscular!
For one, there is not really any such thing as an “ideal weight for height”, simple BMI metrics are well, simple and lacking in nuance. There may definitely be an “ideal” weight, but it’s more in terms of how much of a percentage of your weight is in body fat, raw weight in pounds isn’t terribly important or even informative. Ideally one uses tools like body-fat calipers and such to actually see if someone is at a healthy weight, thin is a subjective term and just because someone does or does not “look thin” to you doesn’t mean they are at a healthy weight.
Some people may look too thin and actually be at a healthy weight whereas others may look too heavy but also be at a healthy weight. Just judging based on height/weight isn’t all that great a method (there’s a reason that the military will do a secondary test on your body fat % if you don’t meet the height/weight limits–because they recognize that not everyone is built the same and that body fat % is a better indicator of whether or not someone is at a healthy weight.)
In any case, women in particular are ideally at 15% or so body fat (although I’ve seen it stated that going as low as 10% is okay), women are naturally supposed to have a higher body fat % than men, and it isn’t typically all that healthy for them to go under that (to go low enough to get a “six pack” as a women means you are going below the medically recommended body fat %.) Men on the other hand can get by with like 2.5% body fat and still be healthy because well, the genders are physiologically different in this regard.
Of course we should also recognize that being healthy is also a matter of how fit you are and what you eat, you may not eat very much food and thus be skinny but if the food that you do eat doesn’t give you the right vitamins/minerals or has too much saturated or trans fat or sodium or cholesterol or et cetera you’re still living in an unhealthy manner.
No, that would be Organic Bransssss.
Perhaps you just happened into the store on Thin, Pale Person Day. Too bad you weren’t also thin and pale, you could have gotten a discount.
That’s another reason the South is still pissed at the north. Lincoln freed all the vegans.
I’ve never been to a health food store - I’m in mid-Mo and we apparently are too fond of our unhealth food - but the few (okay, one) vegetarian I’ve known was quite healthy.
My local health food store is usually full of people who look like they jog, bike or hike a lot. Healthy and fit, but not carrying a lot of excess muscle, either.
My local vegan food store, OTOH, looks like a concentration camp with more hair.
Well, one possibility: Who do you think is more likely to be shopping at a health food store, the person who is ridiculously healthy or the one who feels vaguely rotten? Something motivates people to shop at an alternative food store. I can easily see someone who’s sick being motivated to change their eating habits (or at least hitting up the various nostrums and snake oils that a lot of health food stores sell).