🧙‍♀️ Hansel & Gretel was a documentary...

Hi Reader,

Most of us read Hansel & Gretel as a fairy tale when we were children.

A witch lures two children into a forest with a house made of gingerbread and candy. The children, hungry and unsupervised, walk right in. It sounds like a fairy tale.

So why I am watching the documentary?

My daughter showed me these things last week that I have not been able to stop thinking about.

A single 32-ounce Crumbl "Dirty Soda" - the pink cup with the candy and cream that your teenager or your granddaughter has probably ordered. For example, the viral "Crazy Cousins" packs around 840 calories and 186g of sugar!!!

That is the sugar equivalent of either:

→ 5 cans of Coca-Cola → OR 19 Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts

One drink.

And it is not even the worst offender.

A Baskin-Robbins Large Chocolate Oreo Shake clocks in at 263 grams of sugar and 2,600 calories and 135 grams of fat!

That's more calories than most midlife women should eat in an entire day, delivered through a straw in 10 minutes!!!

Meanwhile, the American Heart Association's recommends daily added sugar limit of 36g for men and 25g for women! And that's even too high in my opinion for a single drink with zero nutritional value.

You're scratching and clawing to feed yourself well in a food environment that has been engineered to make sugar invisible to the eye and irresistible to the brain.

You're like a parent watching her daughter walk into a forest where every house looks like a fairy tale.

The problem is:

The witch isn't sleeping. She is running an industry.

So how do you protect yourself, and the people you love, from a forest full of gingerbread houses?

NUTRITIONAL LITERACY.

Macro literacy is the ability to read food the way a librarian reads a book. Once you can read it, you cannot be deceived by it. Once your daughter or granddaughter can read it, she can walk past the cottage without going in.

→ Are you good with quick mental math? 4 grams of sugar = 1 teaspoon. That 186-gram drink? Forty-six teaspoons!!! Now picture pouring 46 teaspoons of sugar into a cup. That is the drink. My brain is still having a hard time processing this!

→ Are you a label-reader? Every wrapper is a story. Read every one of them for a week. You will never see food the same way again.

→ Do you have a little extra money? Leverage that. Real food costs more in the short run. It costs enormously less in healthcare over time. The math is brutal in both directions.

A brain that is bathed in 200 grams of sugar three times a week is laying down dopamine pathways that will follow for decades.

Sugar addiction is a measurable neurological process. The reward receptors in the brain light up in patterns similar to other addictive substances, and the patterns are most plastic in adolescence.

Translation: the sooner people in your life learn to see this engineering, the easier it is for them to move through their adult lives without being captured by it.

Your literacy is also their literacy. They watch you.

You can start with my free personalized macro calculator if you havent already. It will give you and the people you love a baseline understanding of what their bodies actually need. It also includes a lifestyle medicine blueprint that walks you through the whole-food principles I teach.

Both are free. Both will start the literacy.

You do not have to pay me anything to begin.

You can also invest $27 into my Mediterranean Macro Cookbook with over 80 protein-forward recipes.

So, Reader, if you are feeling angry reading this email, that is the right response. The food industry has been counting on midlife women being too tired and too overwhelmed to read the labels.

We are going to disappoint them.

I am totally here for you.

Terry Tateossian​
LIFESTYLE MEDICINE COACH
P: (908) 200-8678
​
​Professional Certifications:
​​Lifestyle Medicine Coach, Certified Nutritionist, CPT, RYT-200

P.S. Want to skip the years of figuring out what to feed yourself and the people you love - instead of the gingerbread? My Mediterranean Macro Cookbook is 80+ macro-counted, real-food recipes built for the woman who is done being deceived. $27. It is literacy for your kitchen.