How to Eat Healthy on a Cruise (Without Ruining Your Vacation)

I find that people either love or hate cruises. But personally, I’m in the middle. On my trip last week, I enjoyed great weather with maximum sun and sand, while also giving my six-year-old something to do at the start of his summer vacation. Conversely, I’m wary of the food. I know to expect slop at scale, regardless of the cruise line.

The task of feeding thousands of passengers requires a massive supply operation. Sourcing food that is organic, wild-caught, and pasture-raised is not part of cruise lines’ calculations. Besides, the galley is going to cook everything in cheap and ubiquitous seed oils, just like every land-based restaurant. In addition, cruises offer ultra-processed crowd-pleasers, such as the unlimited soft serve ice cream on Deck 11.

If you look at the ingredients in ultra-processed foods, you’ll see that food scientists frequently formulate these products with high-fructose corn syrup. Federal corn subsidies make HFCS cheaper than sugar, and fructose (fruit sugar) sends a signal to your brain that makes you hungrier and compels you to buy more. Your brain thinks you have only a brief window to take advantage of summer abundance before the lean winter months … which nowadays never comes. 

The challenge for parents on a cruise is that unless you understand how junk food is engineered — and you set limits with your kids — your children will binge on fruit punch, donuts, and soft serve ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The result, at least for the family we traveled with, was the mom and dad taking turns sitting in their cabin while their six-year-old son emptied his stomach from both ends. I would say the parents learned their lesson except they too continued to queue up at the ice cream stand. For them, this kind of eating seemed routine. Their crash will also come, but in even more spectacular fashion, as diabetes, a fatty liver, and a heart attack.   

So what is a useful eating strategy for a cruise?

1. Use unlimited solar access to offset eating errors.
-For starters, head to the top deck at dawn for an unobstructed sunrise. (If you miss the sunrise, on the cruise or at home, you cannot metabolize fat through the Krebs cycle.)
-Absorb sun at the pool and beach so UV light can pull the deuterium (a type of hydrogen) in carbohydrates and seed oils away from the mitochondria in your cells. Deuterium’s interference with our mitochondria’s energy production, and resulting low NAD+, is a concept gaining traction as the root cause of chronic illness.

2. Stick to your regular meal schedule. At home, I eat only one or two meals per day — a cruise is not the time to add meals.

3. Sign up for the first dinner seating so that you’re eating your last meal of the day while it’s still light outside. At night, your body processes glucose less efficiently and digestion works more slowly. (As a year-round rule, eat only when the sun is up to avoid circadian dysfunction.)

4. Make the least worst food choices.
-At breakfast you can ask for just the poached eggs that sit on top of the Eggs Benedict.
-For lunch you can get hamburger patties from the snack bar; I also found a taco bar and asked for a bowl of guacamole with toppings of chopped tomatoes and shredded cheese.
-For dinner you can find steak on the menu, which although grain fed and raised at concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO), might still be a net nutrition plus.  

I also showed off a little for my wife and friends each night when dessert was served. I would eat exactly one bite, then put down my utensil for the evening. The first day was one sliver of the flourless chocolate torte; day two was one spoonful of the ice cream sundae; day three was one taste of the cheesecake. I lament that in today’s eating culture, this kind of self-control is worthy of attention.