You Asked: What to Eat? What to Avoid?

Today I will be answering another question posed by a fellow ward member...what foods should I eat and what foods should I avoid? The ultimate question, yes? Now, I could take this opportunity to dive into a full-blown lecture on antioxidants, B vitamins, cholesterol, diabetes, enzymes, fiber, glycemic load, high fructose corn syrup, iron, joules, the krebs cycle, lipoproteins, manganese, nitrogen, olive oil, potassium, quadriceps, riboflavin, sodium, theobromine, unsaturated fat, valine, water, xylitol, yellow fever, and zinc (that's right, friends, I just listed one nutrition-related thing for every letter in the alphabet!). But I'd surely leave you more confused, and the honest truth is, you don't actually need to know that much about food to have an awesome, healthy diet. After all, how much did our ancestors know about food? Relatively little compared to what the scientific world knows now, yet our ancestors were much healthier, less overweight, and relatively untouched by chronic disease like diabetes and heart problems. So what was their secret?

They ate REAL FOOD. Like fruit, vegetables, meat, grains, milk, oats, fish, and eggs. But in our day, we have taken all these real foods and processed the goodness right out of them. The result is....food-like substances. These are some examples of food-like substances:




What are the differences between real food and food-like substances?

Real Food:
Looks like its ingredients
Has 5 ingredients or less
The processing it underwent did not destroy its nutrients (example: freezing is a form of food processing that does not drastically harm nutrients)
Has vitamins and nutrients to keep your body running the way it should

Food-like Substances:
Have lots of ingredients and don't resemble any of them (there is corn in a donut, but would you guess by looking at it?)
Have ingredients that you cannot picture and/or pronounce (what does maltodextrin look like?)
Have to have man-made nutrients blasted into them so they can make health claims like "Excellent source of calcium!"
Are low in natural nutrients and vitamins but HIGH in calories
Your great great grandmother wouldn't recognize them as food
Underwent damaging processes in order to have longer shelf lives (anything with trans fat in it has been tampered with to make it nearly non-perishable)

So here's your challenge for the week. Try to make the majority of your diet REAL foods! It's REAL good for your body!