Eat Food

Just finished reading In Defense of Food . One of my goals for 2012 was to read at least one book a month and, so far, I'm doing well with this one.  I've also read quite an assortment.

I got a little bogged down with all the facts, history, science, studies...but the author provides a very thorough explanation and argument for his approach to eating.  He recommends returning to traditional ways of eating real, well-grown and unprocessed foods.  He elaborates on how all of the processing of food is depleting them of nutrients.  As a result of eating a diet of processed foods, we are overfed but undernourished.  From the book...

A loaf of bread is one of the traditional foods that everyone knows.  Bread is traditionally made using a remarkably small number of familiar ingredients: flour, yeast, water, and a pinch of salt.  But industrial bread has become a far more complicated product of modern food science.  As an example, he lists the complete ingredients list for Sara Lee's Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread.  It lists over forty ingredients, many unfamiliar [ethoxylated monoglycerides?] and unpronounceable ingredients [azodicarbonamide]. 

 

The main point is to return to eating whole foods.  The type of foods, according to the author, that your great-grandmother would recognize as food.  In summary, return to eating food, and enjoying food, not food products.  Not eating things that are incapable of rotting might be a good place to begin.  Eat food.  Not just to be healthy but to bring pleasure back to eating.  

~Kate