Eating Natural Isn't Easy
By Eve Prang Plews
Licensed Nutrition Counselor
(Originally published in Sarasota's Natrual Awakenings magazine March, 2011)

There’s an easy argument to be made that trading up for better ingredients is at least a step in choosing a healthier diet. You’ll get no argument from this author. Yet eating natural food that looks like it came from nature is still not the norm for many.  It’s easy to relegate food preparation time to the bottom of the “all-I-have-to-do” list.  Certainly that contributes to choosing already prepared food, whether it comes from the deli, hot bar or frozen food section.  It doesn’t imply that these are bad choices, just not optimal.

The awareness that every bite and every swallow of food and drink are chemical letters written to your DNA telling your genes how to behave is a HUGE realization.  Genes are NOT fate. They are only the blueprint, not the building materials.  No matter how superb the blueprint is, if you use poor quality building materials you’ll end up with a defective or weak or toxic structure: note Chinese drywall.  When you finally come to terms with the all too coarse fact that every meal either makes you more alive, more optimally healthy or it makes you more dead. Then and only then can you dedicate yourself to really choosing quality food that adds aliveness to your future and better functioning to your body.

Eating natural isn’t natural in this preservative laden, artificially flavored and colored, sugar and salt loaded selection of choices put in front of us with every other TV advertisement, fast food sign and celebratory party.  Attention to your committed values to eat well takes perseverance and tolerance of the barbs of friends and detractors alike.

It’s convenient to eat badly.  Your friends are reassured that their poor decision to go face down into that plate of deep fried whatever is not so terrible when you join in.  It’s easy to say “Well, it was holiday time or vacation or my sister-in-law is in town – she made it. I don’t usually eat that”.  Right.  You can’t fool Mother Nature, but more important, you can’t fool your DNA or your cells.

That’s not to say that either the beer or the brownie is trouble in and of itself.  Not true.  But come on, you either value for your own health and wellbeing, or you are cavalier thinking the diseases of aging won’t happen to you.  Get real. To not really care about food quality when two thirds of all American deaths are diet related (heart disease and cancer) is tantamount to ripping pages off your calendar of life.

You don’t have to be food neurotic to recognize the difference between a Pringle and a potato or a chicken and a chicken (gag) nugget.  If you can’t pick it up or dig it up it’s not a member of the plant family.  Fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, fungus, nuts and seeds are all Mother Nature’s carbohydrates.  Everything that grows out of the ground is a carb. The largest portion of your dietary choices, by weight or volume, should be plants.  But when you turn fruit into fruit leather with 26 ingredients, it’s no longer fruit.  Duh. Eat an apple, have a pear, chomp down on some juicy pineapple; those are fruits.  Yes organic anything is better for you and the planet than pesticide laden produce.  But if the organic sweet potatoes, beets and carrots are deep fried in high inflammatory creating omega 6 oil like sunflower – it’s still junk food.  Don’t kid yourself.

If you knew what processors did to make a burger sold at a drive–through restaurant you’d never eat it.  After all, do you pour ammonia over your ground meat to kill bacteria?  When you buy meat, fowl or fish, make sure to avoid processed, ground, sausaged and otherwise re-tooled meat.  Buy a whole chicken instead of parts; get a turkey breast instead of sliced deli meat.  Buy an eye round of beef and hand it to the butcher to grind on the spot instead of buying a tube of mystery ground meat.  Every food decision for health counts.  And it counts a lot.  No matter if you shop at the big box stores or the farmers market, choose things as close to the way they occur in nature as possible.  Your DNA and your future will thank you and so will the Earth. 

Eve Prang Plews, a licensed Nutrition Counselor, has been in practice at her Sarasota clinic, Full Spectrum Health, for 22 years. You may contact her at 941 952-1200 or www.fullspectrumhealth.com.  Her previous articles are available at eveplews.com.  Eve’s radio show,  No Nonsense Nutrition, airs Mondays at 9 AM on WSLR 96.5 FM, or stream it live at wslr.org.  Alternate Mondays at 11AM she is on WMNF, 88.5FM Radioactivity call in show with Rob Lorei.