When Did We Become So Delicate? 

    I know that medical knowledge is progressive and changes every day. We don’t bleed people anymore, doctors now wash their hands between operations, and medical people don’t give their patients drugs like laudanum. We may be using things just as detrimental to our health and just haven’t figured it out yet. 
   Along with these innovations comes a plethora of information about things that may be harmful to us. Like gluten, aluminum foil, plastic bottles, just to name a few. Most of these things are products we have been eating or using for years, and now all of a sudden are told they are best avoided. What happened to us? It seems that we are suddenly a lot more delicate than in the past. 
    My parents and certainly their parents would be astounded at all the suggested things to avoid. If Mom’s kitchen had been deprived of butter, whole unpasteurized milk, (the folks owned a dairy), cream, sugar, and just plain iodized salt, (not even gathered in some foreign country or body of water), Crisco shortening (fat), and then the pièce de résistance --- non-fluoridated, non-treated water that came out of an irrigation ditch, she wouldn’t have been able to feed us all those delicious meals. And the amazing part was the lack of sickness in the family.     And as for anything “low fat”, “reduced calorie”, or “organic”, they hadn’t even been invented yet because the health paranoia hadn’t set in yet. 
    If we ate that kind of stuff today we’d be sick all the time and demanding the attention of health practitioners of all disciplines. Like I asked at the beginning, “When did we become so delicate?”