Photo by Chicago Man
When I first took my “leap of science” to stop dieting and start eating Real Food, carbs were the scariest thing. I hadn’t eaten anything resembling a grain in years and didn’t know where to start.
So like any good American consumer I went to the cereal aisle and chose what looked like the “healthiest” cereal. It was a brown flake cereal with lots of fiber and omega-3s. It had the word “Nature” in the brand too.
I felt super virtuous.
Little did I know that even then I was being sucked in by marketing and pseudoscience.
The more I learned about health and nutrition, the more skeptical I became about what I actually believed was healthy.
Eventually I came to understand that the only consistent predictor of the health value of food is whether or not it has been processed. I became more rigorous in what I defined as Real Food.
That was when the cognitive dissonance hit me: flakes don’t grow on trees.
Even though I had accepted that carbs wouldn’t make me fat and grains were Real Food, I hadn’t realized that the “whole grain” label on the cereal box was a load of marketing BS.
There’s nothing whole about a cereal flake, no matter how much fiber or omega-3s it contains.
These days I eat plain ol’ muesli for breakfast prepared like oatmeal. I add 1/2 cup to a bowl, cover it with water, microwave it for two minutes, then flavor with cinnamon and a splash of unsweetened hemp milk. It’s freaking delicious.
I don’t pretend the hemp milk is super healthy, I use it because I like the creaminess and flavor.
Real Food comes from the earth. You can tell by how it looks and whether or not you can picture it growing from the ground, hanging from a tree, roaming a pasture, or swimming in the ocean.
If it started that way then spent time in a factory in order to arrive at its current form, it’s been processed.
Of course some light processing is fine (e.g. rolled oats, cultured yogurt), but industrial processing does not a health food make.
Eat what you like, but don’t be fooled by front of package health claims.
Have you been falsely led to believe a processed food is really a health food?