Here are four simple questions. If you can answer yes to each every time you eat, you’re probably eating healthy food:
1. Did it come from the ground somewhere near you?
2. Did the only processing it endured take place in your home?
3. Did you feel satisfied after you ate it?
4. Was your digestive system happy too?
But you’re a busy professional! You probably don’t have time for the kind of garden that would provide all your needs. And what if you live in a climate where nothing grows for 6 months or so? What about those items that won’t grow in your climate at all or that you’re not likely to grow?
Most of us probably won’t press our own extra virgin olive oil or cure our own olives. We’re not likely to grow and harvest wheat and grind it into flour and make bread or pasta. Most of us don’t even have time to pickle or prepare a summer harvest for the freezer.
So…how can busy professionals be sure what we eat and feed our families is healthy?
If you spend any time on the internet, you’ll find lots of information about what healthy food is. Every week, there’s a new super food. Sometimes it seems as though every item has been a star among healthy foods.
It’s kind of like a game: and this month’s winner in the Food of the Month Club is . . . Posts urge you to fill up your kitchen with this month’s super food: 3,717 ways to make and eat cauliflower (the most recent Food of the Month).
Posters could and probably have named almost any food a super food, the Food of the Month. Even the much-maligned, carb-loaded potato will probably be a super food someday. They are rich in calcium, iron, phosphorous, vitamin C and potassium. The “peels” are a great source of fiber. Potatoes are inexpensive and easy to digest, reduce inflammation and protect against cancer, high blood pressure and many other diseases.
But is that really a healthy way to eat?
Gardeners can tell you they drown in particular vegetables as they come into season and struggle to find ways to use them. Before the internet, a book called Too Many Tomatoes addressed this issue with lots of recipes for each particular vegetable. How much of one vegetable can you eat before you lose interest in it? Sometimes people not only lose interest they get nauseous. People report nausea if they regularly have green smoothies with only one variety of greens.
There’s probably a reason you lose interest in a vegetable if you eat too much of it. There’s probably a reason you might start to feel some nausea. All greens, for example, contain small amounts of toxins, different toxins, intended to prevent over-grazing. That’s why otherwise healthy greens can make you sick if you eat them exclusively.
We simply aren’t meant to eat a single plant food constantly, out of proportion to everything else, no matter what its health properties are. Conversely, we probably don’t need to avoid particular plant items (like grains) if we are able to eat them in unadulterated forms, properly prepared.
So what are some real world rules for busy people to follow for healthy eating, rules that allow us to answer the four questions with “yes” most of the time and not get trapped in the healthy food game?
1. Choose plant foods as often as you can.
2. When you’re shopping, choose a variety of organic and local fruits and veggies. If all-organic is cost-prohibitive, get familiar with the “Dirty Dozen” list of fruits and veggies, published yearly by the Environmental Working Group along with a “Clean 15” list. Try to avoid the Dirty Dozen if you can’t afford those items organically.
3. Read labels on any packaged goods you buy. Look for pure products with few ingredients, no added sugars (Ingredients Label), no additives and with the contents as close to their original form as possible.
4. Keep preparation simple. While cooking makes us human, it can also make us sick depending on how we do it. Slow cooking methods without charring are best.
And the next time you pick up an announcement for the winner of the healthy Food of the Month award, read what it has to say and appreciate it, but don’t fill your shopping cart with it.
Teri
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