Healthy Eating: What’s REAL Healthy 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 the book "In Defense of FOOD".
• What then is healthy eating and REAL health food? • Best Healthy Eating Cookbooks? • Why Start Eating Healthy When Pregnant? • Healthy Food for Toddlers Eating Healthy? • Healthy Eating Activities for Kids Healthy Food: 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 Food Guide: Eat REAL FoodMichael 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 2 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.
Healthy Recipes• Healthy Recipes: BEST Cook Books for Families, Kids & Adults • Great Blueberry Recipes and Snacks Surprise Discoveries for Healthy Eating• QUIZ: Which are Healthy Fats and which Fats are Deadly? • What About those Omega Oils? • Eggs A Whole Food for Better Cholesterol? • Dark Chocolate As Good As Heart Meds • Red Wine and Anti Aging Effects: Which Wines Best? • Disease Fighting Nutrition Discovery • Importance of Eating Healthy? • Eat Yourself Beautiful for Best Skin Care • Disease Fighting PROTEIN against Parkinsons, Cancer, Heart Disease & ALS? • Easy Steps to Eating Organic or Whole Food Meals Healthy Eating for Kids & Teens• Eating Healthy Activities For Kids • Getting Kids Eating Healthy: 10 Tips and a Healthy Recipe • “Bad” Carbs A Cause of Child Obesity and Child Health Problems, say Scientists • Successful Healthier Eating Advice for Kids • Giving Fat Kids A Better Chance Healthy Food for Weight Loss & Belly Fat Loss• Weight Loss Tips: Diet and Exercise? • Hypothyroidism: Low Thyroid Causing Energy & Obesity? • Best Fat Loss for Belly Fat Loss and Diabetes Diet • Do Natural Fat Burners Work? • HCG Diet helps with OBESITY by "re-setting" Appetite Control? Healthy Eating: Nutrition FIRST Meds LAST?• Best Nutrition with Cancer Treatment • Nutrition As Good as MEDS for Heart Disease? • Natural Blood Thinners as good as Blood Thinner Medication? • Use Food or Meds to Bust Cholesterol? • Natural Cure for YOUR Heart Disease Symptom? • What Vitamin Supplements against Dementia? • Recent Health Discoveries for Arthritis, Alzheimers, Parkinsons, Lou Gehrigs, ALS Healthy Food for Children• Why Start Eating Healthy When Pregnant? • New Breast Feeding Benefits: Doctors Change Breast Feeding Rules • Healthy Food Plan for Toddlers Eating Healthy • Healthy-Eating Activities for Kids • Best Healthy-Eating Cookbooks • Nutrition Discovery Against Disease? Healthy Eating: Simply REAL Healthy Food & Healthy Living & Healthy Eating Cookbooks with Healthy RecipesGO to Health Discoveries HOME PAGE from healthy eating |
Inconvenient, he says, because the health of Americans has only deteriorated since we started exiling carbs, fats -- even fruits -- from our daily meals.