Posts Tagged ‘grass-fed’

Healthful Diet: A Too-Simple Summary

Monday, August 15th, 2011

Everyone else pontificates on what we should eat, why can’t I?

Two big points, A and B.

A.  Only eat food that is made of … food!

This means don’t eat junk food.

This also means don’t eat most convenience foods.  If you look in the freezer case at the grocery store there will be frozen vegetables there and they are good for you.  Nearly everything else in the freezer is bad for you.  If the frozen broccoli is made of stuff that isn’t broccoli, don’t eat it.  If you can’t pronounce the ingredients, don’t eat it.  If the ingredients include a lot of salt or sugar or long words that you don’t know the meaning of, don’t eat it.  If it even has a long list of ingredients, be suspicious.  The word “hydrogenated” means don’t eat it.

If eating out, don’t eat fast food.  This doesn’t just mean don’t go to McDonalds, it means don’t go to restaurants that can’t convince you their food is made of food.

B.  Eat stuff that is good for you.  This second big point has three sub-points.

  1. Fundamentals, remember what your grandmother told you. Eat your vegetables, eat real fruit, don’t eat too much salt (okay to sprinkle on top at the table, not okay to spoon in during cooking).  Deep fried foods should be eaten in moderation.  Desserts and other “treats” should be eaten in moderation.  Organic is good (one can tell how much someone eats organic food by measuring how much pesticide is in their blood).  Maybe don’t eat animal products that are too industrial in how they are raised and processed.
  2. Don’t eat so much sugar.  This includes not eating so much potatoes because they rapidly turn into sugar in your body.  Same with white bread, white rice, and other refined starches.  After too many years of eating too much pure starch and sugar one can easily end up with “adult onset diabetes”.  Lately we have gotten so efficient at this that kids now get “adult onset diabetes”, so they had to change the name to “type 2 diabetes”.  Refined carbohydrates are dangerous, go for hearty whole-grain.  (If bread is colored brown but is still as soft as Wonderbread, don’t eat it.)
  3. Don’t eat so much corn.  Back in the ’70s the US federal government changed agricultural policy to encourage lots of grain production (alas, not fruits and vegetables), and this has mainly meant every year we produce mountains of corn.  And the food industry has been working hard to figure out how to get us to eat it ever since.  The kind of corn we are talking about here is not sweet, but they have an industrial process to convert the corn starch to “high fructose corn syrup”: don’t eat it.  Junk food is loaded with corn.  Somewhat hidden is “corn fed beef”.  Beef cattle have spent many thousands of years figuring out how to digest grass.  It is an impressive feat, and they have done it!  They will even wander around and harvest the grass they eat.  So what do we do?  We put then in packed corrals where they can’t much move, and we feed them trucked in corn.  Then we slaughter them young, before their health gives out, because they are not designed to eat corn and it makes them sick.  Eat local grass-fed beef, it tastes better, is safer, better for you, better for the planet, better for the cattle.

Unfortunately, if you put all this together, it means you that if you are stuck in an airport waiting for your next plane…there is little to eat.  If you are at the mall…there is maybe nothing to eat.  If you are at a convenience store…there is very little to eat.

Shop at real supermarkets, go to a local farmers’ market if there is one near you.  Pack a lunch.  Support restaurants that try to serve food that is made of … food.

-kb, the Kent who is eats better than he used to, and who even gets some exercise.

©2011 Kent Borg