Your Food and Why It Matters
I think it is safe to say nearly everyone knows you should eat healthy to prevent chronic disease and increase longevity. But what does eating healthy even mean when there is so much contradictory and confusing info out there on diets? Meat is bad, meat is good, saturated fat is bad, fruit is bad, bread is bad, sourdough is good, rice has arsenic, red wine is good for your heart- just kidding it is not. This rhetoric is exhausting😫
If we have access to all this technology and diet information, why is our country the sickest out of all developed countries, and what is the root cause of our health epidemic? One of the reasons is that our food is frequently non-nutritive or has a low nutrient density because of mineral-stripped soils and processed foods. We are essentially starving ourselves at the cellular level.
Brief history of our food:
~our ancestors were hunter/ gatherers- fasting, focused on survival, with tribes/ clans subsisting mostly on meat and local forage
~11,000ish years ago we started land cultivation and growing our own food. Diet was a mix of plant crops evolved through selective breeding and animal husbandry
~Early 1900’s- synthetic fertilizers and chemicals started being used in the US on a large scale contributing to higher yields, and thus contributing to considerable population growth
~1950s to now- While steam tractors were being used in the 1800's, it was not until the mid-1900's that more lightweight, affordable tractors were more mainstream and cheap ammonium fertilizer paved the way for higher yield-based farming. This built more reliance on chemical fertilizers and inputs to do everything from reduce pest pressure, increase yields, lengthen shelf-life, reduce mold after harvest, etc.
~1980s GMO's came on the farming scene as a solution to reduce crop loss. However, biotech companies were already using genetic modification in the 1970s to produce things such as Humulin insulin. GMO crops with increased nutrient values have been proposed as a solution for starvation and disease (such as the golden rice project aimed at helping vitamin A deficiency in developing countries). GMO’s come with some major controversies which I won't get into now.👀
In less than 100 years, the above practices have created a major conundrum. While we have increased yields with mechanized mono-crop farming and chemicals, we have simultaneously degraded our soils and ecosystems to the point that they may not recover in our lifetime, creating desertification on a mass scale. We need these soils to survive and can learn from many civilizations before us as far as what can happen from unsustainable farming practices.
And while we struggle to find a better solution, we have to keep our respect for farmers and their hard work; many of them have been forced into this unstable market-driven, subsidized system. Not everyone wants to be a farmer and we NEED them!!
Our grandparents grew up eating ‘organic’, they just didn’t call it that. The new ways of farming have essentially been a chemical farming experiment and our country's drastically declining health has been the outcome.
Of course, there are other lifestyle factors and genetic predispositions, but our diet has changed along with the soil’s declining nutrients. The nutrient values of food compared to 50 years ago are now remarkably lower in vitamins and minerals. There are many studies out there about this; this one shows dramatic declines in our food's nutritional value in the last 50 years.
In addition to this, we have an industrial food production system chock full of over 10,000 chemicals and additives, ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, soy and corn fillers, factory meat, ultra-processed foods using grains stripped of nutrients, and refined oils not really fit for human consumption.
Our modern living with these ingredients, sedentary lifestyles, and toxin exposure is causing widespread obesity, metabolic dysfunction, chronic disease, autoimmune disease, and sadly so much more.
The Good News
There is good news I promise! We have choices every day all day in what we choose to eat.
+Look for high-quality, organic, local, regeneratively-raised foods
{regenerative is a newer term for an old practice. It focuses on building soil not simply extracting}
+you can grow your own food (even a little bit helps) and reduce chemicals in your food supply
+join a local farm’s CSA (community-supported agriculture)
+shop local producers and ranchers at the farmers market or local food store, or source online
+Did you know that even Whole Foods will source products locally from produce to meat to wine?
As far as what to eat…this is not a one-size-fits-all with different medical histories, food sensitivities/ allergies. Our diet is such a powerful, personal decision.
You can start with the following, making changes slowly so they stick…leaving perfection and stress at the door.
Whole foods (not processed/ or in packages, organic when possible to reduce glyphosate & pesticide exposure)
don’t drink your calories, and if you have alcohol limit it and drink with a meal
reduce/ eliminate added sugar
eat meat and animal products from pasture-raised animals to get all your essential minerals, fats, amino acids, protein, and peptides
eat healthy fats (extra virgin olive oil, unrefined/naturally refined coconut & avocado, flax, butter, lard/tallow from pasture-raised)
I am not a nutritionist, but a nurse informed by my own experience, that of patients, and years of self-education in these topics. I encourage others to seek out peer-reviewed research and not get their news from social media.🙄
If we look at our ancestors prior to our country's mass decline in health and a sharp increase in chronic disease, there is strong evidence that our diets used to work for us. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my family to be someone else’s experiment in a study I didn’t sign up for.
