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Monday, January 18, 2010
Four simple rules for a healthier, greener diet
Posted by Blaire Yancy on Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM
Our culture shapes our diets, corporations market choices to us, restaurants we like to spend time in (or like because we spend basically no time in) line almost every road in our city. Our supermarket society makes it easy for us to eat foods that sound or look healthy without our understanding of the contents of that food. We trust it. We assume we eat generally well, but we generally don’t.
To change to a healthy diet we must truly understand the food that we eat.
A charming rule recommends this: if your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize it, don't eat it. (This means Pop-tarts). Our world advanced incredibly with its ability to create foods from chemicals, but until the last beast falls and the last grass is grazed, make better choices. We still have food on the planet, miraculously. Let’s not jump ahead of our doom.
Refine your tastes. Sweetness need not reign. Popular sugar substitutes like high fructose corn syrup, the sweetener/preservative made cheap from excess corn production, shows up in everything from snacks to meats to loaves of bread. It loads us with extra glucose and fructose our bodies cannot fully metabolize. Instead, it sits on our thighs and middles and leads to Diabetes, obesity, and that crashing energy that brings us to the couch rather than the park.
The best advice for last: cook your own meals. This may sound foreign and frightening, but humans survived and advanced because we cooked our own food. You can do it. Cooking is not only a creative outlet, it will make you a smart shopper, a healthy eater, and is likely to improve the health of your relationships with those you cook and eat with.
Start with these simple rules and become a healthy and environmentally conscious eater and consumer.
Good luck in 2010 and cheers to your health.
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