There are many reasons why people get nutrition so wrong. In the next two installments I want to talk about some common problems that most people never think about. The reason is because many of the things that make a food bad, aren’t made obvious at first glance or through the education we're given about food.
Let me give you a quick example. I went down to FL last week to see some family and friends. I stayed with a friend of mine who, like me is a bachelor so I didn’t expect a lot of cooking to go on. I decided to run by an Applebee’s restaurant where I figured I could find a nice chicken, potato, and vegetable type of meal. How can you screw that up right? Well, leave it to the food scientists to figure out a way.
First, the chicken was like this pressed processed deal that I couldn’t quite figure out but it had so much flavor it couldn’t have been natural. Then their garlic mash potatoes were so creamy that they weren’t even potato consistency. Although they taste good, that was a lot more than garlic. I couldn’t believe when they asked me if I wanted butter and sour cream for these things. Last though was the broccoli. How can you screw up what looked to be steamed broccoli? Most people would eat the broccoli and think that they were doing something good for themselves because its broccoli. Not at Applebee’s though. I quickly noticed that there was something wrong. Sure they were delicious, but broccoli isn’t supposed to be creamy is it? I took the biggest piece and squished it down with the flat end of my fork… Like a Play-Doh factory, this butter jelly came pouring out of every crevice. There was more of this gelatinous mass than there was broccoli when it was all said and done. To their ‘credit’, it was only one big piece that it actually squeezed out of but that was enough for me to see what I was eating and be thoroughly grossed out.
I never looked at the calorie count of the meal but I can assure you that it was much higher than any chicken, potato, and vegetable meal I would have made at home and who the hell knows what kind of nasty chemicals I was putting in my body?
So why is it that I couldn’t just go into a restaurant and order a healthy meal when it was really all I was looking for? I’ll tell you why. It’s about flavor. Let’s face it, we all love flavor. I mean what is the joy of food that is bland or worse? There’s a reason people pick chocolate cake over broccoli even if you know that the broccoli is what you should be eating.
Flavor is the reason we go to one restaurant over another one. It’s what you tell your friends about when you get home. It’s why you drink your tea sweet and your coffee loaded with sweeteners and cream. In the food business, flavor is king.
Unfortunately, the king is killing you and sabotaging your weight loss goals.
See, the magic of that meal was that I was supposed to eat this “healthy” food and be none the wiser. I was supposed to feel good for eating (doing) the right thing and see that at Applebee’s, doing the right thing is actually pleasant. I was supposed to think, man, I’m gonna eat the broccoli here all the time. How do they make this good-for-me broccoli taste so damn good? This is so much better than at my house.
Problem is, most people will do just that because they haven't been taught any better. We've all grown up on the government recommendations which say that grain or rice should be the base of a healthy diet. They fail to tell you that you’re only told this because it’s cheap and abundant. Most people listened to the multibillion dollar ad campaigns designed to make you see the word “light” on a box of processed, genetically modified, chemical filled crap to mean a healthy option. We’ve grown up around the idea that soy is health food instead of the genetically modified Agent Orange…oops (sorry Monsanto)! I meant the patented Round-Up ready estrogen boosting, anti-nutrient filled, chemical covered #2 cash crop in the US that it really is. We’ve grown up thinking calories in natural sugar are far worse than calorie-free chemicals, that essential fat is deadly, and much needed cholesterol is heresy.
If you’re not paying attention, your food is killing you and you’re none-the-wiser. You're eating the broccoli and can’t figure out why your doctor keeps putting you on more medications. Your buying the fat free box of Hot Pockets and wondering why you keep gaining weight and your chest hurts. You’re eating foods that are iron rich and being told you have an iron deficiency and you can’t figure out why!
Well here’s why. Flavor. See, natural food has flavor. Its subtle but its there. Once upon a time, this flavor was enough for us but then someone discovered spices. These were healthy spices that could be used to add zest to our already delicious food. After a while though, competition started to spring up. Huge corporations got in the mix, populations boomed, farming practices got worse and began developing food that had less nutrition and less flavor, soil was depleted of nutrients, farm animals were taken off their natural diets and got sick, nutrient damaging pasteurization processes became necessary to ensure their sickness wasn’t passed to you, they found a way to process everything for better shelf life, and all the while the flavor of these foods was all but destroyed. That’s not all though, your health went right along with it.
The food companies now had a problem on their hands but with a little ingenuity they would turn it all around and create a monster of death and profit in their wake. People everywhere began getting fat and getting diseases that just a few years earlier weren’t very common at all. It wasn’t hard to see that changes needed to be made. What changes though? People don’t want to eat bland health food, plus it’s so expensive. In fact, with the population boom, it would be hard to even feed everyone on real healthy food. They needed a villain and they had it. Fat…
The new campaign would be that fat was bad, calories, are bad, cholesterol is bad. Problem is, fat free food sucks. It has no flavor and the texture is awful. The answer was to increase the sodium and sugar and to hire some lab guys known as “food scientists” to come in and fill the void. These scientists were able to develop artificial flavors and colors and emulsifiers that blew past anything found in nature and they put them in everything from our cereal to our juice. They fed chickens dye to put the yellow back in egg yolks and made new extremely flavorful candy such as Jolly Ranchers. After a while we caught on to the sugar so they started making artificial sweeteners proven from day one to give you cancer but they have no calories and they’re even sweeter than sugar. Now you can drink zero calorie Coca-Cola and because there’s no fat, sugar, or calories feel like it’s a great alternative to water. Forget about the cancer causing chemicals you’re loading your body up with.
Its gotten to the point now though that we are no longer entertained by our normal human diets. Our taste buds have been so assaulted with the artificial flavorings that we find real food to be bland and boring. We see that food as (yuck), health food. This stuff isn’t health food. It’s real food. Organic is synonymous with health food but it’s not. Organic just means no one fucked with it or injected it with anything that shouldn’t have been there or sprayed poison on it. Organic chicken and some organic vegetables without a bunch of sauce all over it is not health food, it’s just food. It’s what you would be eating if the big corporation’s scientists never came along.
The reason why Applebee’s can’t serve healthy broccoli is because you won’t eat it. It’s time to change all of this. If you’re sick of being sick, fat, medicated, and depressed then its time for you to make a few changes. First change you need to make is to begin eliminating artificial flavorings from your diet.
Some simple ways to do this are changing your artificial sweeteners to real sugar. If you go to Starbucks, stop using Splenda (sugar with chlorine injected into it) and start using Sugar in the Raw. The gradually take that down until you aren’t using sugar either. Trust me, once you get used to it, you prefer it that way.
Stop drinking soda. If you can’t stand water, try vitamin water or sports drinks. I’m not saying that these are healthy, just that it will notch you down on the flavor side until you can drink water again.
If you like milk chocolate, try to move to 70% dark chocolate. Its much healthier and has far less sugar.
If you salt your food at the table, stop it. If you’re cooking your own food and need more flavor, forget about salt. Go to your local grocery store and pick up some fresh herbs. Play with a few of them and then just add a pinch of salt. Its amazing how it will bring out the flavors in the food if done right.
As much as possible, stop eating fast food and boxed food. Do your grocery shopping at the perimeter of the store and go into the isles as little as possible. You’ll find that you’re shopping cart looks a lot better when you get to the end of the store.
Buy organic whenever possible. Organic food is often filled with minerals in balances that we need for our health. These mineral balances also effect the flavor of the food in some ways though.
There you have it. A lot of rant and some tips to help you get through the deadly food jungle that haunts our modern world. Once you break out of the land of artificial flavors, something interesting happens. You actually begin to notice new pleasant flavors in your food. Your pallet becomes more sophisticated and biting into the food you once couldn’t get enough of but you knew was killing you, will be a terrible experience that will not have you coming back for more.
Train hard,
Kris
I think it's better to stay at home and cook your own food, that way you can assure that what you are eating is fresh, healthy, and preservative-free. Sure it's nice to eat in a restaurant once in a while but nothing beats home cooking.
Posted by: Indian Food Buff | 14 May 2010 at 04:20 AM
I agree. nothing really beats cooking your own food. it's healthy.
Posted by: Carol | 23 July 2011 at 07:07 PM
I choose to have my own food at home. That way I'm assured of the cleanliness and nutrients in it.
Posted by: SamsungGalaxys720c | 24 June 2012 at 12:47 AM