After seven years of studying nutrition and many more working in the health and wellness field I grew more and more concerned at hearing my fellow dietary professionals recommend chemicals and preservatives as part of a healthy diet. From sugar and fat replacers to light desserts, it was all suggested as a way to eat healthfully.
Simply put, I disagree.
This blog is about reducing fake foods – things that really aren’t food at all. This blog is about choosing the natural versus the synthetic. This blog is about total wellness and wellbeing. These are the motivating factors for reducing fake foods, but they encompass so much more.
These nagging thoughts that true health could not be the result of all these chemical-based foods started long before I discovered books such as Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Real Food: What to Eat and Why, and Food Politics. I was ecstatic to find that there are many others out there who feel the same I do about real food, not to mention some research that supports our beliefs.
If you haven’t read these books, they are an excellent place to begin your own research into healthy eating. I encourage you to read them, and not only that, but to put the principles into practice in your daily life.
I happen to find whole grains thrilling, natural fats satisfying, and minimally refined sugars complex and intriguing. I experiment with all of these foods. I garden, support my local farmer’s market, I will learn to can in 2010, and we buy our meats from local, sustainable farms.
My goal is to provide a platform for discussion, food focused posts with recipes using some of my favorite real-food ingredients, and news about research and current events as they relate to real food, nutrition and health.
Oh, and I’m also a former ex-pat. My husband and I lived in southern Brazil for 2.5 years and just returned to the US late 2009. We love to travel and experience other cultures through food. I believe that we have a lot to learn from other cultures. Their food practices should be spreading to us, not the other way around.
This blog is not about eating everything organic, or eliminating animal-based products, or any other single food group. It is about choosing your foods wisely, selecting meats from sources which can verify that the animals were treated humanely and selecting produce in its most natural form.
I feel we all find our own path to health. What works for one person may not work for another. I am just a nutritionist who believes that we gain valuable nutrients from all real food.
Personally, I am on a quest to reduce and eliminate fake food from my diet. By my definition, fake foods are those shelf stable items that list a myriad of chemical and preservative names in their ingredient list. They really aren’t food at all, just a bunch of synthetic substances made to look and taste like food.
On this quest, I realize that I am only human. Our environments make it difficult to completely eliminate some of these foods. The idea is to remove these foods as staples in my diet whether they are believed to be healthy or not. They simply are not food and real food is what I want fueling this body.
