By Ren Wellness

There's a version of this conversation that turns into blame.

Blame for the lunchboxes full of processed snacks. Blame for the margarine instead of butter. Blame for the low-fat everything, the cordial, the white bread, the dinners that came out of a packet because there simply wasn't time for anything else. Blame for the habits we inherited, the tastes we developed young, the relationship with food we've spent years quietly trying to repair.

I understand the impulse. When you start waking up to what we've collectively been eating - and why - it can stir something that feels a lot like anger.

But here's what I keep coming back to: that anger is pointed in the wrong direction.

Because our parents didn't fail us. The system failed them first.

The Generation That Got There First

Think about what your parents generation walked into.

They were the first. The first generation to grow up with convenience food as a normal, everyday feature of life. The first to be handed a shopping trolley in a supermarket and told that modern science had made eating easier, safer, better. The first to be sold the idea that what came in a packet, a tin, a brightly coloured box - was progress.

And they believed it. Of course they did. Why wouldn't they?

The messaging was everywhere. It was on television, in women's magazines, in government dietary guidelines, in the advice of doctors and nutritionists and public health campaigns. It wasn't fringe thinking. It was the mainstream. It was official. It was, as far as anyone was told, settled science.

They had no reason to question it. And no real framework to question it with.

Because the generation before them - our grandparents - were not preparing their children for a world of ultra-processed food, industrialised seed oils, and laboratory-engineered flavours. That world didn't exist yet. Our grandparents cooked from scratch because that's what you did. They ate seasonally because that's what was available. They used butter and lard and whole milk and didn't think twice about it, because no one had told them yet that those things would kill them.

And then, almost overnight in the span of human history, everything changed.

The Lies They Were Told

Let's be specific. Because this isn't vague cultural drift. This is documented, deliberate misdirection - and our parents were caught right in the middle of it.

The cholesterol lie.

In the 1960s and 70s, saturated fat became the villain. The theory - largely driven by flawed and selectively presented research - was that dietary fat raised cholesterol, and raised cholesterol caused heart disease. The solution? Remove the fat. Replace it with something else.

What they replaced it with was sugar and seed oils. And what followed was one of the greatest public health disasters in modern history.

The research that contradicted this narrative was buried. Literally buried - studies funded by the sugar industry that showed sugar's role in heart disease were suppressed for decades, only coming to light in the 2010s when internal documents were finally unearthed. Our parents had no way of knowing. Their doctors had no way of knowing. The information simply wasn't available to them.

The seed oil swap.

Out went butter. Out went lard. In came margarine - proudly low in saturated fat, marketed as the heart-healthy choice, stamped with endorsements and medical authority.

What margarine actually contained were partially hydrogenated vegetable oils - trans fats - that we now know are far more damaging to cardiovascular health than the saturated fats they replaced. The very thing sold as protection was causing harm. And a generation of well-meaning parents spread it on their children's toast every morning, because they were told it was the right thing to do.

The low-fat era.

By the 1980s and 90s, "low fat" had become synonymous with healthy. Fat was the enemy. Food manufacturers responded by removing fat from everything - and replacing it with sugar, refined carbohydrates, and a cocktail of additives to restore the flavour and texture that fat naturally provided.

The result was food that was technically low in fat and aggressively high in everything else that causes metabolic dysfunction. And it was sold in health food aisles. It had green labels and heart tick symbols. It was what a responsible, health-conscious parent bought for their family.

The convenience revolution.

Alongside all of this came the pace. The relentless, accelerating pace of modern life that made convenience not just appealing but necessary. Two-income households. Long commutes. Longer hours. A culture that equated busyness with worth and rest with laziness.

In that context, the 20-minute meal kit, the microwaveable dinner, the after-school snack that came in a multipack - these weren't indulgences. They were survival. They were a parent doing their best in a world that demanded everything of them and gave them very little back.

Our parents were busy and exhausted and trying. And the food industry was right there, telling them it had the solution.

They Were Roped In Just Like We Were

This is the part I want to sit with for a moment.

Because I think there's a tendency - especially as we go deeper into this work - to view our parents generation through a slightly superior lens. We know better now. We read the labels. We question the guidelines. We've done the research they didn't do.

But have you ever stopped to ask: why do we know?

We know because the information eventually became impossible to suppress. Because independent researchers kept pushing. Because the internet democratised access to science in ways that couldn't be controlled. Because enough people got sick enough, for long enough, that the cracks in the official story became impossible to ignore.

Our parents didn't have that. They had the TV and the doctor and the government pamphlet. And all three said the same thing.

They weren't incurious. They weren't lazy. They weren't bad parents.

They were living inside a story that had been constructed around them - by industries with enormous financial incentive to keep them there - and they had almost no tools to see outside it.

Sound familiar?

Because the same thing is happening to us. Right now. In different forms, with different products, through different channels. The playbook hasn't changed - only the specifics have. And the question isn't whether we're being misled. It's what we're being misled about that we haven't figured out yet.

Humility matters here. Our parents did their best with what they had. So are we. The difference is what we have access to - and what we choose to do with it.

Repairing the Relationship

So what do we do with all of this?

First, we let our parents off the hook. Genuinely, fully, without caveat. Not because what happened doesn't matter, but because blame keeps us stuck in the problem rather than moving toward the solution. Our parents loved us. They fed us from that love. The fact that what they fed us wasn't always what our bodies needed isn't a reflection of their care - it's a reflection of the world they were navigating.

Holding onto resentment about a lunchbox from 1998 is not going to heal your gut. Forgiving the system that created that lunchbox - and taking responsibility for what goes in yours now - might.

Second, we get curious rather than overwhelmed. Repairing your relationship with food doesn't mean overhauling everything at once. It doesn't mean guilt about every meal that came before this moment. It means starting to ask questions. What's actually in this? Where did it come from? How was it made? How does my body feel after I eat it?

These aren't radical questions. They're the questions humans asked naturally for thousands of years, before the food industry convinced us that the answers were too complicated for ordinary people to understand.

They're not. You are more than capable of understanding what you're putting in your body. You always were.

Third, we recognise this for what it is: generational healing.

Because when you change the food in your home - when you choose real ingredients over engineered ones, when you cook from scratch even imperfectly, when you teach your children to read a label or question what's in their snack - you are not just making a health choice. You are interrupting a pattern.

You are saying: the story that was handed to us ends here. We are writing a new one.

That's not a small act. In the long run of a family's health, it's everything.

It's Not Your Fault. But It Is Your Responsibility.

We've said this in a previous blog post and we'll say it again here, because it's worth repeating.

The circumstances that shaped your relationship with food - the dietary guidelines your parents followed, the products they were told were safe, the pace of life that made convenience feel like the only option - none of that is your fault. You didn't choose to be born into the middle of the greatest nutritional experiment in human history. Nobody did.

But you are here now. With access to information your parents didn't have. With the ability to question what previous generations couldn't. With the awareness, however it came to you, that something about the way we've been eating doesn't add up.

And with that awareness comes responsibility. Not guilt. Not perfectionism. Not the crushing weight of needing to get everything right all at once.

Just the quiet, steady willingness to do things a little differently. To learn. To unlearn. To make choices, one at a time, that reflect what you now know.

Your body is waiting for you to start. Your family is shaped by the choices you make today. And the generation that comes after you will inherit either the patterns you changed - or the ones you didn't.

That's the work. It's not always easy. But it is worth it.

And you don't have to do it alone.

A Note on Grace

Before you close this - I want to say one more thing.

Wherever you are in this journey, you are not behind. You are not too late. And you are not failing because you don't have it all figured out. Allow yourself some grace.

If you're still eating things you know aren't great for you - grace. If you're feeding your family imperfectly while trying to do better - grace. If you grew up eating processed food and your body is carrying the weight of that - grace.

Healing is not linear. And it doesn't require perfection to begin.

It just requires a willingness to pay attention. To ask the next question. To make the next better choice, whenever you're ready.

That's enough. That has always been enough.

We're glad you're here. 🌿

With love, Tash - Ren Wellness

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