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Healthy Eating: What’s REAL Health Food?

What’s healthy eating? We know that good health is often less a matter of miracle medicines than of common sense whole food. But what is real health food?

• Do you try your best to follow healthy eating directives – and stuff your grocery basket with processed foods that claim to lower cholesterol, weight, glucose levels, and you name it?

• Unfortunately, these convenient "healthy" alternatives to whole foods are appallingly inconvenient, says renowned food writer Michael Pollan, the author of In Defense of Food

• Inconvenient, he says, because the health of Americans has only deteriorated since we started exiling carbs, fats -- even fruits -- from our daily meals.

• What then is healthy eating and REAL health food?

Healthy Eating: What Does It Mean to Eat Well?

In the midst of rallying cries to lose weight and be healthy, Pollan cuts through the noise with simple guidelines:

• "Eat food.

• Not too much.

• Mostly plants."

Why? Our consumer society is based on making attractive products. For food, this means added sugar or added fat and refining out basic nutrients.

How does this refined food affect us? These are implicated in most chronic diseases including diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.

• Americans are eating a whole lot more -- at least 300 more calories a day than in 1985.

What kind of calories? Nearly a quarter of these additional calories come from added sugars (and most of that in the form of high-fructose corn syrup); roughly another quarter from added fat.

• Eating health food simply means changing the lack of nutrients and excess of fat and sugar by eating REAL food. How?

Simple Healthy Eating Guide: Eat REAL Food

Michael Pollan has researched and boiled down a complex topic to the essentials. Here is a sampling:

1. Eat REAL food:

Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food, such as a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. From Refined back to Whole Foods:

Fast food is fast in the sense that it is to a considerable extent predigested, in effect, and therefore more readily absorbed by the body.

For instance, refining grains makes them easier to digest, by removing the fiber that ordinarily slows the release of their sugars.

This processing has found a way to deliver glucose — the brain’s preferred fuel — ever more swiftly and efficiently. So the Western diet offers us the instant gratification of sugar, but the “speediness” of this food overwhelms the insulin response and leads to Type II diabetes

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.

All of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best.

Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement!)

4. Pay more, eat less:

There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care.

5. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.

6. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden.