What is health food? Is it rice cakes and sprouts? Is it fruits and nuts and vegetables? Is fish good for you or too fatty? How about eggs? Don’t they have too much cholesterol to be good for you? Milk? You should definitely be avoiding red meat right? Is it those Healthy Choice meals that are low fat and low sodium? What about trans-fat free crackers? The 100 calorie packs of Oreos? Sports drinks? Granola has to be healthy right? What about chocolate? I heard chocolate has antioxidants? Oh I know, the healthiest stuff is the exotic food. Like berries grown on the sides of distant mountains that no human has ever had access to!
What exactly is health food?
All most of us know about health food is that it’s boring, bland, expensive, and it’s confusing as all hell. There is a way to make it really simple though. Ready? Here it is…
There is no such thing as health food.
I know. It’s totally nutty right? After all, if there’s no such thing as health food then what are all those health food stores for? Well follow me in my craziness for a minute and think you’ll agree with me.
Today, there seems to be a war against food. Calories are bad, fat is bad, carbs are bad, animal protein bad, plant protein isn’t complete, meat is bad, fruit is bad, beans mimic hormones, milk is the devil, eggs will kill you, sugar is bad, salt is bad, cholesterol is bad, vitamin toxicity!, too much iron in your diet, trans fats! Oh NO!
The list goes on and on and on but the truth is all of that is a bunch of BS. Is there some truth to some of it? Sure. I think we all know that anything to an extreme is a bad thing but that’s not where this comes from. Where it comes from is the very concept of health food vs. regular food. Tell me if you’ve heard this question before?
“Is there really any advantage of eating organically grown food in comparison to conventionally grown food?” See the problem with that is the mere fact that conventionally grown no longer means organically grown and organically grown has become some hoity-toity yuppie phrase for I shop at Whole Foods so I’m better than you. Conventionally grown should be throwing a seed in the ground and putting some water on it. If you wanna get really fancy you can rotate crops and throw some shmancy cow dung on top of it. I’m not a farmer but I hear crops like BS and that’s good because it gives them somewhere to put it other than shoveling it out to us.
The reason there is a war on food is because mainstream food is no longer food and the stuff we call food is killing us instead of nourishing us. It’s not “conventional” vs. organic and it’s not health food vs. junk food;
It’s food vs. not food.
This is not Cookie Monster food.
For years now there has been talk about red meat being unhealthy. Let me explain this a little. Most people under about the age of 30 have never tasted red meat in their lives. Did you know that red meat is naturally lean? Red meat packed with vitamins and minerals and healthy fats. It has a very distinct flavor that doesn’t come just from the fat. Red meat comes from animals like cows that have natural diets and lifestyles. Their natural diets that they are meant to eat provide them nutrients and allow them to grow at the pace they were meant to grow. Their hormones are self regulated and they get exercise and have healthy immune systems. As their bodies are filled with nutrients, those nutrients are then passed onto us when we consume them.
What most of us consider red meat is that of an animal that is fed a diet that leaves it malnourished and sick, it’s given hormones to make it grow faster than it should (think steroids and what it does to the human body), it lives its entire life in a cage so small it can’t turn around, it gets no exercise, it stands knee-deep its own feces each day, and in order to keep it alive through all of this they load it up with manmade antibiotics. Most of today’s cattle farmers agree that if they didn’t slaughter the animals when they do, they would be dead in a few months anyway. As their bodies are filled with sickness and disease, that sickness will also be passed onto us when we consume them.
People think of grass fed vs. grain fed beef as both beef but one is a little healthier than the other. The truth is they are not the same product. Grain fed might as well be imitation meat. One is natural and nourishing food to us and the other is a synthetic manmade poison. Everything about it is damaged and mutated.
It’s the same way with everything. Eggs and meat from unhealthy chickens, farm fish raised on an unnatural grain diet, milk from unhealthy cows that are given hormones to produce far more milk than normal which is then pasteurized and homogenized. Even fruits and vegetables that are genetically modified, never allowed to ripen on the plant, and en route to you for weeks before you get a chance to eat them are very different from that grown naturally until ripe and eaten shortly after picked.
It’s not just that one is healthier either. It’s that one you were meant to eat and the other you weren’t. In other words one of them is food and the other isn’t.
So get the phrase health food out of your vocabulary. Stop asking yourself if this is healthy or not and start asking yourself a simpler question… Is what I’m about to eat even food? If it is, it’s healthy. If it’s processed, covered with chemicals, manmade, or genetically modified, it’s not.
I’m going to close this with a radical tip as to how you can make sure the food you’re eating at home is actual food. Follow it if you can as it’s worth trying out at the very least.
Stop shopping at the mega grocery stores and instead do your main shopping at your local farmer’s market. It’s more fun than shopping in stores, the food is healthier, you know where it comes from and are encouraged to ask questions about how it was grown and raised, and the money you spend doesn’t end up in Walmart’s coffers but instead your local community. What’s that you say? You won’t be able to buy Pop Tarts and Twinkies and Healthy Choice meals? Well then, you’ve officially won the grocery shopping wars now haven’t you?
Until next time,
Kris
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So is "certified organic" labeled meat always going to be good for you, or is there just as much risk in eating that compared to the cheaper mega mart meat?
Posted by: Joe | 04 July 2010 at 09:07 AM
Great question. Honestly, certified organic only means that the feed the animals were given was certified organic and that no unnecessary hormones or antibiotics were administered to the animal.
While this is definitely and improvement as you don't have harmful chemicals, it doesn't mean the animal was free range, treated humanely, or that it had a diet natural to the animal. Just that the primarily foreign to the animal grain feed was grown organically.
The other side to this is that some smaller farmers that actually do let their cows and chickens roam free to graze and peck as much as possible (weather permitting) and do give only natural feed when they have to give feed, can't label their food as organic because there is a hefty cost to having something certified. Many will grow their own feeds and know them to be organic but because the feed isn't certified, they can't legally say its organic. So, if you go to farmers markets, ask them.
Lastly, what you're looking for is grass finished (grass fed until the end) for beef and milk, and pastured or free range (not cage free) for chickens and eggs. Find that and you're generally in a good place.
Thanks for the question and let me know if I should further clarify something.
Posted by: FitnessQuests | 04 July 2010 at 05:09 PM
You stated there is no such thing as health food. It’s totally nutty right? After reading your article Kris I didn't think is was nutty. I love the way you explain everything in details. Keep up the good work!!!
Posted by: Genaro Fontanez | 02 April 2012 at 10:37 PM