Eat Real Food

Mercedes Sinclair/Nutritionist

If the conflicting information on nutrition has left you baffled, it means you’ve been paying attention. I became a nutritionist to unravel the mass of conflicting information about food. I wanted that one eureka moment when I would become the all-knowing expert on what to eat. I delved into the blood type diet hoping to find redemption from the confusion. I looked into into the metabolic diet for some clarification. I read the literature from the best of the best of today’s nutritionists only to learn that they’re equally confused.

Though elements of truth seeped through all the data I consumed, I wanted to hang my star on something that reflected my intuition about food and nutrition. Food and eating should be simple and straightforward. Nothing I researched even came close.

A friend of mine invited me to a three-day workshop on nutrition and health conducted by Sally Fallon and Dr. Tom Cowan. A simple yet profound mantra was repeated over the three-day workshop. It fell in harmony with my intuitive sense about food. The mantra was “Eat Real Food.” My eureka moment had arrived.

Now, like Johnny Appleseed, I am spreading the seeds of an uncomplicated message, “Eat Real Food.” At first pass, the idea is rather intimidating. We have wrapped ourselves around the paradigm that eating real food is too inconvenient. If the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, why would we veer to the right or to the left for the inconvenience of finding and making real food.
La Rochefoucauld is quoted saying, “To eat is a necessity but to eat intelligently is an art.” The art of intelligent eating bypasses our need for convenience.

Alice Waters, the owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, calls it “delicious revolution.” “It’s adhering to these principles: Getting people to make the right decisions about big issues relating to our environment, eating food that’s delicious, buying at the farmers market and buying what is in season, supporting farmers who take care of the land, slow-food values rather than fast-food values, taking the time to appreciate family and friends and appreciating the change of seasons.”

Eating real food closes the gap from pleasure in eating to getting nutritional value in what we eat. In Sally Fallon’s book, Nourishing Traditions, she writes, “The first modern research to take a look at health and eating habits and eating habits of isolated traditional societies was a dentist, Dr. Weston A. Price. Dr. Price traveled the world in the 1930s to observe population groups untouched by civilization, living entirely on local foods. While the diets of these people differed in ways, they contained several factors in common. Almost without exception, the groups he studied ate liberally of seafood or other animal protein and fat in the form of organ meats and dairy products; they valued animal fat as absolutely necessary to good health, and they ate fats, meats, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, and whole grains in their whole, unrefined state.”

Dr. Price found fourteen groups—from isolated Irish and Swedish, from Eskimos to Africans—in which almost every member of the tribe or village enjoyed superb health. They were free of chronic disease, dental decay and mental illness. They were strong, sturdy and attractive, and they produced healthy children with ease, generation after generation.

We attach much of our good or bad health to genetics, but genetics doesn’t tell the whole story of our well-being. Professor William Garfield of the University of Washington states that nobody has ever proven that a single gene causes a single human behavioral trait. Even hair color and height are not simple traits fixed by genes.

He goes on to say that though Europeans and the Japanese have grown an inch every decade, Americans haven’t grown at all in this period. They’ve shrunk, possibly because of poor prenatal care and junk food diets.

In Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he writes, “One of the most important, yet unnoticed changes to the human diet in modern times, has been in the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6, the other essential fatty acid in our food. “ He goes on to say that problems arise when they fall out of balance. There is research to suggest that the ratio of these fats in our diet may be more important than the amounts. An imbalanced ratio of omega-6 to 3 can contribute to diabetes, heart disease, obesity, learning and behavioral problems in children and depression in adults.

As our diet and the diet of the animals we eat shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain, from grass to corn, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone from roughly one to one, the diet of hunter gathers, to more than ten to one. The process of hydrogenating oil also eliminates omega-3s. We may one day see this shift as the most deleterious dietary change wrought by the industrialization of our food chain.

Yes, eating real food is inconvenient, so is ill health. As P.D. Ouspensky writes in his book New Model of the Universe, “It is easier to disregard a healthy body, whereas a sick body subjects man to itself, makes him think too much of it, demands too much attention to itself.”

The road to eating real food is a journey of the soul. You’ll find passionate people on the path to finding the where, when, why and how of real food. Unsurpassed in the silent movement is the hope of giving to the next generation an attitude about food that is centered on ideas that really matter. To this generation it offers the promise of a healthy life.