Think, Eat, Be Healthy

Real Food Beats Processed Food

garden vegetable salad

Real food means whole food. Cucumbers, carrots, potatoes and apples are not peeled. Tomato seeds are left in and no, I don’t usually peel my ginger or turmeric root, either.

Real food is whole food. It is food the way nature provides it to us: carrots, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables the way they are picked from the garden or farm. Real food is unpeeled, uncut and otherwise unadulterated. Real food does not need a package or an ingredients list. It is the source of whole food health, the basis of a healthy whole food diet.

All of the diets proven to promote good health are based on real food. The Mediterranean diet, the paleo diet, the Atkins diet, the Ornish diet, the Budwig diet, the DASH diet – all of these are variations of a whole food diet. Some stress less fat, some stress less meat, some restrict grains or carbohydrates in general, but they all eliminate highly processed foods.

This one thing health promoting diets have in common, no processed foods, is much more important than any of the differences between them. It is, in fact, the key to why almost any diet made up entirely of real food will be a healthy diet. It stresses the harm done to our health by eating processed foods.

Think about the time before air travel and before world-wide travel by ship became common. Everyone on the planet had to eat only what could be grown within a short distance of home. This meant widely varying diets depending on where people lived and the season of the year. There were never papayas or pineapples in Minnesota and there were never fresh strawberries in winter and Eskimos did not know what a kiwi fruit looked like. And there were hardly any processed foods and hardly any sugar. Everyone ate real food that was in season or preserved for winter and most people were relatively healthy. Cases of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer were limited almost entirely to the elderly rich.

But why is this so? Why are processed foods so harmful to our health? What makes them so different from real foods?

Highly processed foods are almost entirely simple carbohydrates and simple sugars. Processed foods have been stripped of most of their dietary fiber and nutrients. This processing makes them very easy to digest. It allows us to absorb them very quickly into the bloodstream. And this is exactly the problem.

Processed foods

Processed foods are mostly simple carbohydrates and sugars which cause many metabolic problems when eaten in large amounts.

Processed foods are so easy to digest that they do not trigger a “fullness” response, so we eat more than we need. Because they are simple carbs with little fiber and are absorbed quickly, they cause huge spikes in blood glucose levels. This in turn triggers huge insulin spikes. The large amounts of insulin lead to mass storage of fat and blood sugar crashes. The blood sugar crashes trigger hunger pangs and lead to repeats of the cycle. After a period of years, the result is obesity, metabolic disease and diabetes.

We also tend to be undernourished even though we are over-weight. Stomach and colon cancers increase because of the lack of fiber. High blood pressure and heart disease develop because of the systemic inflammation resulting from a diet high in processed foods. Cholesterol levels rise trying to protect inflamed arteries. And these health problems continue to get worse as we eat more processed foods at ever-younger ages.

Real food tends to be high in fiber and complex carbohydrates. Fiber greatly slows the digestion and absorption of simple carbohydrates and eliminates big blood glucose and insulin spikes. High fiber diets also facilitate healthier digestion and lower levels of inflammation. This is why whole foods like brown rice, sweet potato and berries or other fruits don’t cause diabetes but commercial white bread does.

Grass-fed organic beef

Grass-fed organic beef is a healthy protein source, commercial grain-fed beef is not so healthy.

Fats and proteins also have very little affect on blood glucose and insulin levels. A piece of grass-fed beef chuck delivers lots of healthy protein and omega-3 fatty acids; a serving of frozen meatloaf made from grain-fed beef will deliver wheat, soy, high-fructose corn syrup, several artificial flavor enhancers and preservatives and almost no omega-3’s. A home-made vinaigrette salad dressing is cider vinegar, olive oil and some fresh herbs; a commercial low-fat salad dressing will also give you several grams of sugar or corn syrup.

There are many reasons real food is much better for our health than processed foods. It should be a simple choice. If you care enough about your health to go to the gym or to walk regularly, it is just as important to commit to eating a healthy whole food diet. Anyone that can find time to exercise can find time to cook real food. One is just as important as the other.