Table of contents for Back To School

  1. Nutrition 101: The One Rule To Remember…
  2. Nutrition 102: Furthering “Eat Real Food”

Nutrition 101: The Basics

In the last post in this series, I said that the one rule you needed to remember is “Eat Real Food.” It’s simple. It’s effective. And it seemed to resonate well with the community. However, it also generated a few questions that need answering. Obviously, while it’s as clear-cut as “eat real food,” determining what is real food isn’t quite so simple.

Some things are really easy to figure out. Let’s look again at our list of attributes of food:

  • Food grows and dies. It isn’t created.
  • Food rots, wilts, and becomes generally unappetizing, typically rather quickly.
  • Food doesn’t need an ingredient label (and probably isn’t in a package either).
  • Food doesn’t have celebrity endorsements.
  • Food doesn’t make health claims.

Black Listing and White Listing
From that, I think we can make a pretty solid “Black List” and “White List” of foods. Of course, our “Black List” starts with most anything in a package. But there’s a caveat on that rule too as I’ll mention in a second. The first rule eliminates every bit of the garbage that comes loaded with sugar, funky fats, and preservatives. While that’s most everything in a package, it’s also most anything from the bakery section of the grocery - all of those succulent, delicious, sweet-smelling cakes, cookies, and pies. Yeah, news flash: they are metabolic havoc for your body.

What about a “White List”? Vegetables grow and die, rot, wilt, become unappetizing, have no ingredient label, unfortunately get no celebrity endorsements, and the lack of a package means a lack of health claims. So we start off right away with pretty much the entire produce department. Celery, radishes, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, spinach, greens, carrots, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, zucchini, spaghetti squash…need I tantalize you any further?

And the caveat to the “ingredient list” rule? What about olives, eggs, raw nuts, and other packaged bulk products? Most of them come in a package, like a jar of olives, a dozen eggs, or a 1lb bag of nuts, and because they are in a package, they are required to have a Nutrition Information panel and ingredient list. For these types of items, we need to look at the actual ingredient list. Eggs are just eggs. Nuts are just nuts. Those are obviously given a pass. Similarly, olive oil is just olive oil.

Olives, on the other hand, are usually preserved in some kind of brine, perhaps water and/or vinegar, salt, etc. With the caveat to manage your salt consumption, brining is a preservation technique that has used throughout human existence. I give salt- or vinegar-based preservation a pass.

As you can see, our “Black List” is pretty easily recognizable. I doubt there’s any question amongst readers that Doritos, Chips Ahoy!, Gushers fruit snacks, or Go-Gurt are highly fake products and pretty well break every rule of real food. I also doubt anyone can argue too strongly against vegetables, nuts, olives, and good oils. But what about things that aren’t so cut-and-dry?

The Gray Areas
The gray (or “grey” depending on which version of English you’re speaking) areas are where things get more interesting. Here are a few examples of gray areas:

  • Farm-raised Meat, particularly feedlot meat
  • Bread and Pasta
  • Fermented Foods (sauerkraut, kim chi, kombucha, etc)
  • Alcoholic Beverages (beer, wine)
  • Fruit

Wait! What? Fruit? At least one commenter noted that today’s fruits are nothing like the fruits our ancestors ate throughout evolution. Today’s fruits have been genetically engineered (that’s guided evolution, not genetic modification) to be super sweet and sugary. Paleoman ate apples resembling crabapples. We eat Fujis, Granny Smiths, Cameos, and Galas. I don’t think fruit is a necessary component of the diet, but I also don’t think it’s particularly detrimental in moderate quantities. I wouldn’t advise replacing vegetables with fruit, but I do advise replacing grain-based products with fruit (and later replacing some fruit with more vegetables).

Most of these gray areas are pretty easy to clear up. Let’s look at meat. There is no question that humans have “created” the modern cow, whether grass-fed or grain-fed. Chickens and turkeys have been bred to have huge breasts, owing to our desire for lean white meat instead of delicious dark meat, and to grow quickly. But meat itself is a food that the body recognizes. No secret that I’m biased towards meat raised on an evolutionarily-correct diet, like grass-fed beef and lamb and pastured poultry. Eat up on the meat, with the caveat to shore up the omega-3s in your diet with some extra fish oil if eating feedlot meats.

Looking at bread and pasta, it’s pretty easy to discount most any of the standard varieties in the store. Bread really only needs four ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and salt. Most store varieties have far more than four ingredients. But as Katie noted in the comments, bread and pasta can be made at home with a bit of effort, which is quite true. And I really can’t argue with a simple product like homemade bread, though I don’t think grains should be included in the diet very often. I don’t think bread and pasta are quite a “Black List” food (assuming we’re talking about brands that don’t have a mile long ingredient list). However, I also can’t give them a pass. They are processed from a food that doesn’t really belong in the human diet. For me, they go pretty low on the “Gray List,” not quite persona non grata status, but definitely not daily inclusions.

Fermented foods are much easier to deal with. Fermentation is a natural process that other animals take advantage of. Left to its own devices, all vegetation goes through various stages of breakdown. As Anna noted in the comments of the last post, inedible is a matter of cultural upbringing. Things that are delicacies in one culture are seven stages beyond edible in a neighboring one. The fact that humans can harness this natural force to preserve and alter foods is a good thing. Besides that, fermented foods are a source of health-promoting probiotics. Fermented foods are a “White List” food for me.

Of course, alcoholic beverages, while fermented, are another story altogether. While alcohol appears to have some benefits in small amounts, it’s also detrimental in large amounts. It damages the liver and brain, decreases testosterone production, and increases estrogen production. While I enjoy a bit of alcohol here and there (and a bit too much at times), alcohol needs to be tempered with moderation. While fermented foods get the green light, these beverages are more of a “Gray List” item, not particularly harmful and possibly beneficial in small amounts, but detrimental if taken to extremes.

What Do We Do With The Lists?
So here are the quite broad categories we ended up with:
White List (The cornerstones of your meals)

  • Meat
  • Eggs
  • All vegetables
  • Fermented foods
  • Salt/vinegar preserved foods
  • Raw nuts

Gray List (with guidelines)

  • Fruit (Daily)
  • Beer and wine (Less than daily)
  • Bread, pasta, and other grain products (Weekly at most)

Black List

  • Everything with a cartoon character
  • Most everything with a celebrity endorsement
  • Anything with man-made fats or processed sugars
  • Anything you couldn’t realistically make at home

Guess what you can do with those? Eat prodigiously from the White List, sparingly from the Gray List, and rarely, if ever, from the Black List. That’s real food with limited detriment. The further you are from your weight loss goal, the less you should be straying from the White List.

What are your thoughts? Agree? Disagree? Have I miscategorized something?

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