Nutrition Rules

Here are my nutrition rules:

 

·      Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food - There are now thousands of food-ish products in the supermarket that our ancestors simply wouldn't recognize as food. The reasons to avoid eating such complicated food products are many, and go beyond the various chemical additives and corn and soy derivatives they contain, or the plastics in which they are typically packaged, some of which are probably toxic. Today foods are processed in ways specifically designed to get us to buy and eat more by pushing our evolutionary buttons - our inborn preferences for sweetness and fat and salt.

 

Note: If your great-grandmother was a terrible cook or eater, you can substitute someone else's grandmother

 

·       Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the cupboard - Ethoxylated diglycerides? Cellulose? Xanthan gum? The food scientists' chemistry set is designed to extend shelf life, make old food look fresher and more appetizing than it really is, and get you to eat more

 

 

·       Avoid food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup – Not because high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is any worse for you than sugar but being added to hundreds of foods that have not traditionally been sweetened - breads, condiments and many snack foods

 

 

·       Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients - Labels list ingredients by weight, and any product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar

 

 

·       Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients - The specific number you adopt is arbitrary, but the more ingredients in a packaged food, the more highly processed it probably is.

 

 

·       Avoid food products with the word "lite" or the terms "low-fat" or "nonfat" in their names - By demonizing one nutrient - fat - we inevitably give a free pass to another, supposedly "good," nutrient - carbohydrates  - and then proceed to eat too much of that instead, which makes us fat!!

 

 

·       Eat only foods that will eventually rot - Imitation butter - aka margarine - is the classic example. To make something like non-fat cream cheese that contains neither cream nor cheese requires an extreme degree of processing.

 

 

·       Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans - What does it mean for food to "go bad"? It usually means that the fungi, bacteria, insects and rodents with whom we compete for nutrients and calories have gotten to it before we did.  Real food is alive and therefore it should eventually die

 

 

·      If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't - Read the ingredients on a package of Pringles and imagine what those ingredients actually look like raw or in the places where they grow: You can't do it. This rule will keep all sorts of chemicals and imitation food like substances out of your diet.

 

 

·       Eat sweet foods as you find them in nature - In nature, sugars almost always come packaged with fibre, which slows their absorption and gives you a sense of satiety before you've ingested too many calories. That's why you're always better off eating the fruit rather than drinking its juice

 

·      Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the colour of the milk - This should go without saying. Such cereals are highly processed and full of refined carbohydrates as well as chemical additives

 

·       The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead – As far as the body is concerned, white flour is not much different from sugar and recent research indicates that the grandmothers who lived by this rule were right

 

·       Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored – One old wives' test: If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you're not hungry.  Food is a costly antidepressant.

 

·       Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does - Petrol stations have become "processed corn stations": petrol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside for you.

 

End Note:  The average male is seventeen pounds heavier and the average female nineteen pounds heavier than in the late 1970s.