Last week we talked about diets and eating real food.
What is real food? It's meat, fruit, vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds, but in a form where they haven't been processed and there are no additives.
So grinding a grain is not a problem, that's still real food. But taking a grain and extracting something from it, removing this and removing that and then presenting the final products as individual things is usually not real food.
So how do we tell if we're buying real food or not?
The best way is to read the ingredient label.
This is usually the part on the back of the package. The bit on the front that says "All natural" or "No added preservatives or colours" or whatever… That's marketing. Ignore that bit.
The table that tells you the percentage of fat or sugar or protein might be of some interest. In my opinion the most important part is the ingredient list.
Here are some rules of thumb that will help you to make better choices with your food. These are not always going to be true, but they will give you a really good indication.
A short ingredient label is usually better than a long one. A product with 2 ingredients is less likely to have nasty stuff than a product with 23 ingredients.
If you can't pronounce aningredient, don't eat it!
Code numbers. For example flavour enhancer 621 is MSG. If a munfacturer is using a number instead of telling you the name of the ingredient, it's probably because they want to hide something. Don't eat it.
Generic words. Things like vegetable oil. That sounds OK doesn't it? If they don't want to tell you which vegetable oil they're using, it's probably an oil like conola or soy oil that in my opinion we shouldn't be eating. The other one that manufacturers love is Natural flavour, or Natural colour. There's 2 problems with these. The first one is that natural is not necessarily good. Arsenic is natural. Poison ivy is natural. Cockroaches are natural. There are many natural things that you don't want to eat. The other issue is that many ingredients may have started out as something good but they've been processed into something bad, and yet it's still legal to call them natural. Marketers love the word natural. Even if something is 100% natural it's not a guarantee that it's good. So if a manufacturer is using a good natural flavour like peppermint oil, they'll usually list peppermint oil on the label. If a manufacturer is using a questionable ingredient, then they may choose to hide it behind a generic term like natural flavour. Sometimes I see things like "natural raspberry flavour" Most people will assume that it comes from a raspberry. What this actually means is that the ingredient tastes like raspberries, it doesn't mean that it comes from raspberries. It could potentially come from anything.
So unfortunately while there are plenty of good manufacturers, there are lots of others who will do anything to make a buck.
Many legal food additives are known to cause a whole host of health problems. They get away with it by saying, “we only use a little bit”. But a little bit here and a little bit there and a little bit somewhere else adds up. Something which has never been studied to my knowledge is what happens when you combine chemical A with chemical B and they interact? It’d be almost impossible to study because there are so many additives used in food, the potential combinations would be massive.
So at the end of the day, you can't trust the food regulations to protect your health. You need to know what to look for. When you start reading food labels, you'll probably be surprised to find that 90+ percent of the food you're currently eating has nasty ingredients. That's the reality. So what I suggest you do, (unless you have major issues that you want to deal with immediately), is this: as you use up the foods currently in your house, read labels and as you replace them, make better choices.