The Spice of Life!

You may be thinking that I am going to talk about spices today. Or maybe you were thinking sex? Ha ha. Nope.  I am talking about variety! The spice of life.

Since beginning this blog, I have been having discussions on and off the page with friends, family members, students, and clients about the MANY issues that diet brings up. Outside of politics, I find food and what one chooses to eat each day to be about the most controversial subject I could have chosen for my blog. Food is practically a religion for many people and the beliefs we have about what we eat or do not eat are often deeply entrenched and inextricable from who we consider ourselves to be.

Therefore, my goal in this post is to tread lightly.  I hope that my blog can be a support system and a source of information and ideas for the widest range of eaters.  I am attempting to offer recipes and examples for vegans, vegetarians, omnivores, primal and paleo eaters, and plain old (and young!) people! No small challenge here!  But the point I am trying to make today is this: the more variety in your diet, the better.

You may have seen books or workshops out there touting the Raw Foods diet. Or the Cabbage Soup Diet. Or the Atkins Diet.  And I personally know people who have lost weight on all of these programs, including myself, at one time or another. So why not choose to ONLY eat raw food, or cabbage soup, or meat?  For a SHORT period of time, none of these would be problematic. Restricting your food intake, even drastically, for one or possibly two weeks is probably not going to cause long term problems. As long as you don't have underlying issues or diseases that might be exacerbated, like kidney stones, for example.

But, as a life choice, my goal is to eat the widest variety of foods which are healthy and in the forms that nature intended. Meaning, I try to eat as close to the SOURCE as possible. Foods which are highly processed and no longer even remotely resemble the product from which they were derived have to be questioned. What chemicals were used in that processing? What portion(s) of that food were removed? Often high temperatures are used to extract parts of a food and the resulting products are denatured or changed in ways that our bodies are not equipped to handle. How do you know this has taken place when you are shopping in the grocery store? Answer: you don't. These processes do not have to be revealed by manufacturers, only the nutritional content of what is left.

But back to variety!  Raw food, cabbage soup, and meat are all fine to eat on a regular basis. However, I would also recommend eating some foods cooked. Certain vegetables are more easily digested and their nutritional content is more readily available in the cooked form.  Sushi might be safe and delicious in a popular, well-frequented, and highly respected restaurant, but I would never pick up some raw fish in the grocery store and attempt to make my own sashimi.  And despite my previous leanings toward vegetarianism, I currently eat every type of meat.  I wish I had easy access to even more varieties. Again, variety is the key to never eating too much from any single source.

So my recommendation is this: try new things! Have you ever eaten kohlrabi? Rabbit? Venison? Parsnips? Black currants? Wild boar? Goat curry? Kefir? Have you tried grass fed beef? Duck eggs? Celeriac? Pommelos? Natto?  This last one is a fermented soy bean product from Japan which is currently sitting in our fridge. When you try to spoon out the soybeans, they cling to each other with spiderwebby threads, sort of similar to melted mozzarella, but much, much scarier. The smell is unappetizing. The taste, however, is bland and unmemorable. Yes, I actually tasted it.

The wider the range of products you eat the less likely it is that you will be missing out on vital nutrients, including vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other compounds which exist in whole foods and have not yet been discovered by science.  When I was an infant, in the early 1960's, doctors recommended that mothers bottle feed newborns instead of breastfeeding because scientists thought they could adequately duplicate the nutrients in breast milk. In the following five decades, we have discovered SOME of the miraculous benefits of breast milk, which go well beyond the protein, fat, and carbohydrate content. If you are a mom who has nursed a baby, you probably know many of these.  Well, science is slowly discovering some equally amazing compounds in the foods we eat.

And if you are unsure about whether or not you should eat a particular food, there are a few criteria on which you might be able to judge.  Have human beings been eating this food, in this form, for hundreds or thousands of years? If the answer is yes, then check to see if this food has been highly processed, stripped of any of its vital nutrients, heated to high temperatures, or treated with carcinogenic chemicals, such as nitrites or nitrates. If the answer is no, keep looking at the ingredients label, if it has one! (If it has no ingredients label, like a whole apple, then you can probably go ahead and eat it now.) Have other ingredients, like preservatives, flavorings, additives, colorings, or other unpronounceable compounds, been added to it? If the answer is yes, my personal choice would then be to avoid this.

Is eating a wide variety of whole foods easy? I'm going to have to say no. My guess is that it is much easier in today's society to eat a lot of highly processed stuff. You have probably heard the recommendation to shop around the periphery of the grocery store? This is where you find most of the whole, unprocessed foods. Also consider visiting the local farmers markets, health food stores, Trader Joe's (my personal favorite) and your own backyard for alternative sources of fresh, whole foods. And please let me know if you discover a new food, recipe, or shopping location to share with all of us out there hunting and gathering our foodstuffs!