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What Are You Eating?
How do you decide what you eat?
Do you make conscious, informed decisions about nutrition values, ingredients, fat content, sugar levels, calories, and the like?
Do you meander haphazardly through the grocery store during a lunch break or after work and just grab whatever seems good at the moment and fits in the budget?
Do you think that buying foods from the health food aisle or shopping at a health food store means you’re buying healthy food – food that’s good for you?
Not every food in the diet or health food category is actually healthy food. Unfortunately, many foods are labeled “healthy” by government organizations and grocery stores and come to be accepted as a good choice by the general public. Often times these choices are not even true foods; rather they are a chemical compound or other artificial food which has been formulated to replace real foods.
One food category where real food is commonly replaced with artificial food is sugar. Price-Pottenger does not agree with using sugar in any amount because nutrition pioneer Dr. Weston A. Price, DDS discovered in his research that sugar consumption in any amount caused inflammation to the body. The common denominator in Dr. Price’s research was sugar and starches (which the body absorbs and metabolizes as sugar) was a significant cause of degenerative disease. Sugar has been recognized as a toxic substance to humans over the last few decades so the food industry decided to formulate artificial sweeteners as a substitute. These chemical compounds are an even worse choice than sugar as they are not real food and are actually toxic to the body. However, artificial sweeteners do not have the same caloric value as regular processed sugar so the food industry used this as a selling point to consumers, influencing the general population into believing artificial sweeteners are a “good choice.”
Natural sugar in all its forms (whether derived from cane, fruit, milk, trees, bees, or some other source) has one fundamental commonality: it is produced from sources that occur naturally. Artificial sweeteners do not occur in nature. They do not occur at all unless they are created in a laboratory.
So what to do for that special-occasion birthday treat or Christmas potluck? We recommend the use of stevia or yacon syrup. These are real foods that do not cause the inflammation and disease caused by sugar.
We promote increasing your intake of nutrient-dense, naturally grown foods. We place emphasis not on your calorie intake but on the actual foods you’re eating. Optimal health and nutrition come with a good diet, not with dieting.
When making food choices, it pays to take your time and do some research. Once we determine that product x meets our needs (is the best price, has the most options, etc.), we will buy product x habitually until an outside force intervenes. Unless we receive information from a trusted source that we should avoid product x, or the store runs out of product x, or we reach for product x and then notice a really big “sale” tag on product y, we will generally toss product x into our shopping carts without really thinking about it.
People tend to be creatures of habit. Make making good food choices your habit.
Resource Links – Some suggestions to help you find healthy, natural, nutritious, locally grown foods. This list is not all-inclusive. Inclusion in this list does not indicate endorsement by PPNF nor does exclusion indicate condemnation. As always consumers are advised to read labels, make phone calls, and otherwise research their food choices to the best of their ability.
– Eatwild seems to focus on meat, eggs, and dairy and has links to local farms that you can look up by state as well as listings for farms that will ship to you.
– U.S. Wellness Meats will ship meat, dairy, and other products to all 50 states. See www.grasslandbeef.com/
PPNF Members may view the following journal articles for more informed shopping decisions:
What You Should Know When Shopping In A Health Food Store
Grass-Fed Beef: There Is A Difference (Note: The website for the farm mentioned in the article is no longer valid. The standards for choosing quality beef still apply, however, and the Resource Links provided above are a good starting point for your search.)
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