Katie+S’s+OpEd+Article


 * Health food stores are a huge lie and not to be trusted **




 * When I walked into a local health food store for the first time by chance yesterday afternoon, I expected it to be nice little health food store with a few Birkenstock-clad people milling around purchasing tofu. And that’s what it was. At first glance. **


 * As I walked about the store and looked at its products, I saw exotic foods I had never seen or heard of before, and “essential” dietary supplements I never knew I needed. As I looked closely at the products, I began to realize something: they were all total BS. **


 * Why, you ask? Because all those products are rip-offs. Everything is either a scam or insanely expensive, which is ridiculous. Why should it cost more to make something with less preservatives and less chemicals, with less human alterations to ‘nature’s gift’? This will forever be a mystery to me, and the reason why I think health food stores are one of the biggest con operations ever. **


 * A lot of health food stores also offer dietary supplements and vitamins. These supplements are probably the dumbest thing ever, and the store I went to had three full aisles of them. Three full aisles of deception. The three aisles were crowded with tons of little pill bottles, that all had weirdly specific health benefits and insane prices. A small bottle of less than 100 Raspberry Ketone pills cost forty dollars. I have actually tried these pills, and they do absolutely nothing. Forty dollars for few pills that promise everything and do nothing. **


 * Another scam I encountered was a twenty-five-dollar medium-large sized plastic bottle filled with water. But this isn’t just any water. It’s “real” water. “Real Water” is just normal water that’s been alkalized, and the brand claims it has a ton of health benefits. The company also has a website where they brag that Clint Eastwood drinks their water. Clint Eastwood also talked to a chair for ten straight minutes recently, so maybe these “benefits” aren’t really improving anything. **


 * The store also had these sort of seed “treats,” which looked like they had already gone through the digestion process at least once. I never thought that something labeled a “treat” would bring back memories of my middle-school owl feces dissection. This may be slightly judgemental, but I just believe that nothing that looks like owl crap should be labeled a “treat.” **


 * I used to think health food stores were as wholesome as their whole-wheat loaves of bread, but I was wrong. If paying twenty five dollars for a bottle of water or fifty dollars for an actual jar of fat (I’m serious) isn’t enough to prove that health food stores are just as unhealthy and over-priced as a regular grocery store, nothing is. **