General Overview: My Presuppositions Get Challenged

There is so much information to sift through! Bahhh!

I have a ton of presuppositions about food. Saturated fat is bad. Trans fats are worse. Cholesterol must be low. Milk must be pasteurized. Whole grains are better. Vegetarians are healthier than meat eaters. High fat causes heart disease. The long list goes on.

I knew I'd be confronted with a lot of information that I'd have a hard time swallowing and that likely contradicted what the society I've grown up in believes. It's laughably easy to get a book published, to put a website up, to feign research, to ignore significant data or twist findings.

The real-food resources I'm investigating, however, anticipate that their readers and potential converts come in with these presuppositions. Thankfully, the first thing they do is confront the ideas we've believed for so long with research to the contrary. Cross-referencing has become my best friend and gives more credibility to the things I'm reading.

In her book Real Food: What to Eat and Why, Nina Planck begins with some pretty generic statements about real food.

"Fruits and vegetables are best when they're local and in season; grains should be whole; fats and oils unrefined." (2)

I think that's all generally accepted. These statements are a little more bold:

~Real beef is raised on grass (not soybeans) and aged properly.

~Real milk is grass-fed, raw and unhomogenized, with the cream on top.

~Real eggs come from hens that eat grass, grubs and bugs--not 'vegetarian' hens.

~Real lard is never hydrogenated, as industrial lard is.

~Real olive oil is cold-pressed, leaving vitamin E and antioxidants intact... (2)

Did she just say raw milk? What's unhomogenized? And lard? Really? This is going to be a long road uphill.

The best resource I've found for real food is the Weston A. Price foundation. Real food proponents have been looking to his research for decades. Weston Price was a Canadian dentist in the late 19th/early 20th centuries who moved to the States. After a time of practicing dentistry in America, he was concerned for his American patients plagued by tooth decay and chronic diseases. Suspecting poor health due to nutrition, he spent years doing first-hand research of cultures all around the world, taking inventory of their diets and monitoring their health. The results are super interesting:

Price went to preindustrial communities from Canada to Papua New Guinea, studying the diets of Gaelic fisherman, Ugandan shepherds and Swiss dairy farmers. All over, he found people with beautiful teeth, perfectly formed faces, and little or no tooth decay...They were fine in overall health, with none of the chronic illnesses and diseases he found at home. (24-25)

I found this compelling:

When they changed their diets, however, and ate what Price called "the displacing foods of commerce"--the sugar and jam, white flour and white rice, and refined vegetable oils that came on ships with European settlers--their health declined sharply. (25)

Those in the Swiss dairy villages had whole raw dairy products, meat and bone broth soups. In South Asia they drank tea with milk and butter from sheep and female yaks. Mountain shepherds in Egypt had butter. The Masai in Kenya and the Muhima in Uganda ate meat, blood and whole milk. All these fatty foods that we avoid like the plague, and yet these people were receiving exponentially more vitamins and minerals and were in better health than those on the typical American diet at the time. (27)

Price took his findings back to his American children patients, and their health and performance in school "improved sharply." (28)

You can read more about the Weston A Price Foundation at www.westonaprice.org. I'm sure I'll come back to it.

General things I've gleaned so far:

~For us to get the most vitamins, minerals and nutrients possible from the food we eat, it needs to be raw, unprocessed and unrefined. Our soil is depleted and our food is bastardized by the industrialization of food. A lot of the material I'm coming across draws lines between "traditional food" and "industrialized food."

~For this raw, unprocessed and unrefined food to be safe for us to consume, we need to be extra diligent about where the food (milk, meat, produce, etc) comes from and how it's grown/taken care of. More details to come on this one.

~Our bodies are fantastic, but we require lots of things that we can't make ourselves. We can get them from animals and plants, but to get the most from them (or even anything), they have to be bought/eaten under certain conditions. More to come on this, as well. Way more. :)

~Despite our culture's growing wariness of cholesterol and our championing of low-fat diets and avoidance of fatty dairy and fatty meats, heart disease is higher than ever and Americans are still among the unhealthiest in the world. A correlation doesn't always indicate a cause, but it may suggest that something other than traditional foods (meat, eggs, butter, cheese, milk) are causing these chronic diseases.

In blogs to come I'll be looking at certain topics specifically, including real dairy, real meat, real fish, real fruit and vegetables, and real fats vs. industrial fats.

In other news, I went to Central Market this evening to buy my first batch of real(ish) groceries. Not a boxed item in sight! Central Market doesn't have raw milk, but I did find unhomogenized fresh mozzarella and pasture butter with 84% butter fat. I also have fresh bread dough rising in the kitchen. A good start, if I do say so myself. :)

I will need to finish my easter basket full of (not real...) candy and goodies that my sweet husband gave me. But as far as groceries, I'm good to go. :)