At no other time in history has the question of what to eat been so loaded. Celebrity chefs celebrate the joys of gastronomy but we’re too busy counting calories, killing off carbs and fighting free radicals.
Rather than eating for pleasure, our modern day food choices are increasingly driven by our anxieties.
The weekly supermarket shop is full of conundrums our ancestors would never have imagined: low-fat or full fat, low-carb or hi fibre, low cholesterol or high-protein, gluten free or sugar free—no make that dairy free.
And just as you manage to incorporate quinoa, kale and chia into your weekly menu, the nutritional experts will come up with yet another ‘bad guy’ to banish, or must-have micro-nutrient to squeeze into your lunchbox.
More nutrition, less health
In a culture obsessed with health benefits and getting the right nutrients, it can feel like you need a science degree to put together a balanced meal. Pritikin to paleo, cabbage soup to green smoothies—it’s hard to know what to believe.
Meanwhile the true pleasures of eating go out the window along with the humble home-baked apple pie and leisurely (technology-free) family mealtimes.
Let’s face it. Our trust in our own ability to feed ourselves delicious, tasty nourishing food has been slowly eroded right from under our noses. And while the scientists, dieticians and multi-billion dollar food industry continue to wrestle for our attention and bombard us with ever more choices, the overall health of our families and communities has been steadily declining. As our confusion grows so do our waistlines.
Making peace with your plate
So how exactly can you actually make sense the constant stream of contradictory diets and nutritional messages? What if you could return to the pleasures of the plate, enjoy a meal shared with friends, and abandon all those complicated conflicting bits of advice once and for all?
I believe you can reclaim your relationship to food and ‘make peace with your plate.’ And you can do it without needing to digest a whole series of complicated new diet information. After all humans have eaten well and stayed healthy for thousands of years.
What follows are simple principles to get you started, based on sound research, our collective food wisdom and a lifetime interest in eating well. For the best ideas about eating well see the books of acclaimed journalist Michael Pollan (I’ve drawn heavily from his work here). It’s not about having the definitive word on what you should and shouldn’t eat. It’s about having a firm foundation of enjoyable eating habits that will serve you the eater, no matter the latest food finding or celebrity diet.
Two things we do know linking diet and health
There are at least two facts we do know for sure about the links between diet and health. And thankfully this is the one area all the experts agree.
The first fact is that obesity, Type 2 diabetes, 80 per cent of cardiovascular disease and more than a third of all cancers can be linked to the Western diet.
Take a moment consider those statistics carefully. These are the health outcomes from following a diet based on the following: processed foods and meat, added fat and sugar and refined grains. The highly packaged, processed foods of our modern diet are a relatively recent phenomenon in evolutionary terms, yet we already can see the result. As Michael Pollan writes: ‘What an extraordinary achievement for a civilisation: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!’
The second undisputed fact is populations eating a wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases. Certainly, there are some regions of the planet where people live exceptionally long and healthy lives (known as blue zones). These are people and cultures (not scientists or experts) whose eating habits and lifestyle we should definitely be paying attention to. And while these long-lived folk eat a wide variety of foods, what they have in common is that they eat high quantities of fruits, vegetables, nuts, pulses and whole grains. It’s as simple as that.
What if eating well was simpler (and more pleasurable) than you think?
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Thankfully what’ve suspected all along, its food that sustains us. Yes food! From earthy beetroot to ripe juicy tomatoes, to grandma’s stuffed eggplants piping hot from the oven with salad greens fresh from the garden. Fresh whole fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, pulses and grains are bursting with goodness. Grown in healthy soils and minimally processed these whole foods should form the staples of our diet.
That we should eat food (not too much, mostly plants) is the not so surprising conclusion of author Michael Pollan following extensive research of folk wisdom, science and common sense from around the world. These seven words are a refreshingly simple foundation on which to base our food choices. While he does spend an entire book (In Defence of Food) unpacking exactly what this means, there’s still a huge amount of freedom that comes with the core insistence that we should eat real food.
That knowledge, passed down from generation to generation and sustaining human populations for thousands of years, hasn’t changed. What has changed is that instead of cooking for ourselves or within our communities, we have now let an array of anonymous corporations that make up the ‘food industry’ into our kitchens to cook for us.
Only they make ‘edible food-like substances’, in a processing plant, and with contents often so far removed from their natural state, our great grandmothers wouldn’t recognise them as edible. If xanthin gum, high fructose corn syrup and blue no 2 would never find their way into your home-baked blueberry muffin why let food giants like Nestle or Kraft serve them up to you as a mid morning snack?
Which brings us to five handy food rules-aimed at making sure that what you eat is real. (For 64 great ideas about how and what to eat see: Food Rules)
1. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food.
That means pop-tarts, sports drinks, and those squeezy plastic tubes of brightly coloured kid foods are all off limits. As well as much of the fifteen thousand or so new ‘products’ that are likely to show up on your supermarket shelves each year. Good riddance I say!
Apart from all the obviously questionable additives, food products are designed to get us to buy and eat more by playing on our evolutionary preference for salt, fat and sugar. These tastes are hard to find in nature, but when we buy ‘products’ instead of food we end up eating way too much of these. Snack foods are hard to resist precisely because they have been designed to be addictive and convenient to consume.
By selecting food rather than food products you will make the biggest leap to health and happy eating. Pick items that are as close as possible to their natural state – brown rice over white rice, wholemeal over white flour, steel cut oats over microwaveable sachets. A good sign that something is real food and nutritious, is that it will eventually go off and rot.
Keep in mind that processing food takes out valuable nutrients which companies then put back in synthetically to make their bogus health claims. Margarine, one of the first industrial foods which claimed to be better than the real thing, ended up being full of heart-attack inducing transfats. If you eat dairy you’re better off eating small amounts of real butter, yoghurt and cheese. ‘Low-fat’ foods simply replace fats with sugars and carbohydrates. An avocado doesn’t need a label to tell you it’s ‘natural’. Products making bold health claims, or listing the wonders of ‘natural’ flavours, are likely a marketing ploy and better avoided
2. Get out of the supermarket – or shop in the outer aisles
This rule will go a long way to helping you get real food back on your plate. Shopping at the farmers market if you have one nearby is a fantastic way to shop. It’s something I look forward to each weekend (the way I never would a trip to the supermarket). You can fill up your baskets with locally grown fruit and vegies, along with honey, olives, dips and locally roasted coffee and chai teas. You can talk to the producers and connect to the story of your food. Our local markets are a great place to bump into friends and sample the delicious crepes with fresh strawberries or Turkish spinach and cheese gozleme as a weekend treat.
Buying from a fruit and vegetable store, or ordering a box of organic or farm-direct produce from a local delivery service, are other good choices. Of course if you have the space growing your own is the best way to eat – and you’ll never look back with tasty, plentiful produce and herbs. Health food stores, coops and bakeries using traditional methods and ingredients (sourdough, stone ground grains) are available in some areas, making good choices easier.
If the supermarket is your most practical option, stick to the outer aisles with the fresh produce, meat and dairy as much as you can. The middle isles are filled with the traps of processed foods – whole isles dedicated to chips, confectionary and soft drinks. (Who wouldn’t be tempted?) Most supermarkets are laid out the same way, so you’ll miss these if you stick to the edges. As a final resort against non-food, write a list of real ingredients required for your home cooked menus and stick to it.
3. Avoid foods that have more than five (or ten) ingredients.
Ingredients: Wholegrain rye, water, salt.
The idea here is to go for something with fewer ingredients, as they’re likely to be less processed, and more natural. Don’t forget to read ‘ingredients’ as something a normal person would have in their pantry, not colours additives and numbers.
You’ll be amazed at how much unnecessary stuff you can find in a can of tomatoes (sugar, preservatives) or a loaf of bread (thickener, acidity regulators, vegetable fat)—even the supposedly healthy wholegrain varieties. Take our iconic Anzac cookies. The Woollies brand contain 17 ingredients while the ones made at home around 7.
So what are all the extras? A combination of yummy sounding numbers as well as acidity regulator, antioxidant, emulsifiers, preservatives and natural colours. These are not about making the food better for you. They are all about giving food an exceptionally long shelf life (good for food retailers). Store bought options might be handy, but getting most of your food intake from the long-lasting, additive-filled products on your supermarket shelves is not preserving your health.
As ingredients are listed in order of their quantity, it’s also a good idea to avoid anything with sugar in the top three ingredients (or the 57 forms of hidden sugars—like high fructose corn syrup, barley malt, agave syrup) . The number of acceptable ingredients is intended as a guide to help you avoid non-food items. Obviously, the rule doesn’t apply for homemade recipes with lots of real food ingredients. And while corn chips made of corn, salt and oil are better than their additive and flavouring filled cousins, they’re still corn chips!
The next rule is my favourite (because it’s so effective)
4. Only eat snack foods if you make them yourself.
When you make them yourself, you’re far less likely to overeat – or eat them every day. This one’s a real eye-opener. There are days where I feel like eating a bucket of chocolate fudge ice-cream but if I have to actually make the ice-cream from scratch I’ll tend to do one of two things. Go without, or make something quicker and healthier instead. Finally, if I do go all the trouble of making it, I’ll want to savour it and share it around.
Another way to slice and dice this one is to ‘treat treats as treats’, namely something you have on special or social occasions, not every day. To limit these foods try following the ‘s policy’, ‘No snacks, seconds or sweets except on days starting with ‘s.’
That’s a bit tough for me. I have a sweet tooth and know I’ll crave something after lunch and dinner. So on Sundays I make up a box of bliss balls or other natural sweet treats and pop them in the fridge for when they’re needed. I also chop crudités and have homemade bowls of delicious creamy dairy free dips at the ready for when a snack attack hits. Its way cheaper too!
There’ll be times—parties, social occasions—where you break this rule. Chances are when you do, you’ll do it more consciously, (without being tempted to eat the whole packet of Tim Tams).
5. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
Is it the omega 3’s, fibre or antioxidants? Whatever it is, it’s abundantly clear from loads of studies is that eating a diet high in vegetables (and fruit) is good for you, reducing your risk of dying from all Western diseases.
Eating more greens certainly can’t hurt us. And by upping the amount of veggies on your plate you can keep other foods to more balanced proportions. Many traditional societies use meat as a flavouring or special occasion food. The Chinese proverb goes: ‘Eating what stand on one leg (mushrooms and plant foods) is better than eating what stand on two legs (fowl), which is better than eating what stand on four legs (cows, pigs and other mammals).
The greater diversity of foods—whether plants, animals or fungi—the more likely you will get all the nutrients your body needs. That old advice to ‘eat your colours’ is a good one. Lastly, as well as what to eat, pay attention to how you eat and how much (more on fasting in another post).
It’s easy to get caught up in the nutrient guessing game. Instead of identifying meat or vegetables or fish or dairy or any other food type as the ticket to good or bad health, it’s important to remember that human diets (based on real food) vary incredibly across the planet. Think of the high fat seal blubber diet of the Inuit in Greenland, or the high carbohydrate maize and beans consumed by Central American Indians. As omnivores we have clearly adapted to a wide range of foods and very different diets and survived on these for considerable lengths of time.
So rather than looking for the single ideal human diet perhaps we should be embracing a wide variety of foods (not the deceptively varied corn, soy and wheat varieties displayed in the supermarket) and basing our meals more around traditions, than food technicians. At least till the science gets better at understanding just what goes on inside a strawberry or snow pea that makes it so good for us.