OBC Food Rules-Day 39: Eat all the Junk Food You Want as Long as You Cook it Yourself

There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking a soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them everyday.  The french fry did not become America's most popular vegetable  until industry took over  the jobs of washing, peeling, cutting, and frying the potatoes-and cleaning up the mess.  If you made all the french fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work.  The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies, and ice cream.  Enjoy these treats as often as you're willing to prepare them-chances are good it won't be every day.

OBC Food Rules-Day 34: Sweeten and Salt your Food Yourself

Whether soups or cereals or soft drinks, food and beverages that have been prepared by corporations contain higher fat levels of salt and sugar than any ordinary human being would ever add-even a child.  By sweetening and salting these foods yourself, you'll make them to your taste, and you will find you're consuming a fraction as much sugar and salt as you otherwise would.

OBC Food Rules-Day 28: If you have the Space, Buy a Freezer

When you find a good source of pastured meat, you'll want to buy it in quantity.  Buying meat in bulk-a quarter of a steer, say, or a whole hog-is one way to eat well on a budget.  Dedicated freezers are surprisingly inexpensive to buy and operate, because they aren't opened nearly as often as the one in your refrigerator,  A freezer will also enable you to put up food from the farmers market, and encourage you to buy produce in bulk at the height of its season, when it will be most abundant-and therefore the cheapest.  And freezing does not significantly diminish the nutritional value of produce.

OBC Food Rules-Day 27: Eat Animals that have Themselves Eaten Well

The diet of the animals we eat strongly influences the nutritional quality, and healthfulness, of the food we get from them, whether it is meat or milk or eggs.  This should be self-evident, yet it is a truth routinely overlooked by the industrial food chain in its quest to produce vast quantities of cheap animal protein.  That quest has changed the diet of most of our food animals in ways that have often damaged their health and healthfulness.  We feed animals a high energy diet of grain to make them grow quickly, even in the case of rumminants that have evolved to eat grass.  But even food animals that can tolerate grain are much healthier when they have access to green plants-and so it turns out, are their meat and eggs.  The food from these animals will contain much healthier types of fat (more omega-3s, less omega-6s) as well as appreciably higher levels of vitamins and antioxidants.  (For the same reason, meat from wild animals is particularly nutritious; see rule 31).  It's worth looking for pastured animal foods in the market-and paying the premium prices they typically command if you can.

OBC Food Rules-Day 25: Eat Your Colors

The idea that a healthy plate of food will feature several different colors is a good example of of an old wives' tale about food that turns out to be good science too.  The colors of many vegetables reflect the different antioxidant phytochemicals they contain-anthocyanins, polyphenols, flavonoids, carotenoids.  Many of these chemicals help protect against chronic diseases, but each in a slightly different way, so the best protection come right from a diet containing as many different photochemicals as possible.

OBC Food Rules-Day 22: Eat Mostly Plants, Especially Leaves

Scientists may disagree on what’s good about some plants-the antioxidants?  The fiber?  The omega-3 fatty acids?- but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt.  There are scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases; in countries where people eat a pound or more of vegetables and fruits a day, the rate of cancer is half what it is in the United States.  Also, by eating a diet that is primarily plant based, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods-with the exception of seeds, including grains and nuts-are typically less “energy dense” than the other things youe at.  (And consuming fewer calories protects against many chronic diseases.)  Vegetarians are notably healthier than carnivores, and live longer.

OBC Food Rules - The First 21 Days!

The first 21 days have focused on what “food” is.  The next 22 days will focus on what “kind of food” is best to eat.  If you’ve followed the rules offered thus far you will be eating real, whole food most of the time – the simple key to a healthy diet.  Beyond that, you have a great many options.  One lesson that can be drawn from the striking diversity of traditional diets people have lived on around the world is that it si possible to nourish ourselves from an astonishing range of foods – so long as they are real foods.  There have been, and can be, healthy high-fat and healthy low-fat diest, but they have always been diest built around whole foods.  Yet there are some whole foods that are better for us than others, and some ways of producing them and then combining them in meals that can make a difference.  So the rules in this next  section propose a handful of personal policies regarding what to eat, above and beyond “food”.

Side note:  For your own copy of this great book of food rules, please visit your local book store, Whole Foods book section, or online.

OBC Food Rules-Day 21: It’s Not Food if it’s Called the Same Name in Every Language (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles)

OBC Food Rules-Day 20: It’s Not Food if it Arrived Through the Window of Your Car

OBC Food Rules-day 15: Get Out of the Supermarket Whenever You Can

You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market.  You also won’t find any elaborately processed food products, any packages with long lists of unpronounceable ingredients or dubious health claims, anything microwaveable, or, perhaps best of all, any old food from far away.  What you will find are fresh, whole foods harvested at the peak of their taste and nutritional quality-precisely the kind your great-grandmother, or even your Neolithic ancestors, would easily recognize as food.  The kind that is alive and eventually will rot.

OBC Food Rules-Day 13: Eat Only Foods that will Eventually Rot

What does it mean for our food to “go bad”?  It usually means that the fungi and bacteria and insects and rodents with whom we compete for nutrients and calories have got to it before we did.  Food processing began as a way to extend the shelf life of food by protecting it from these competitors.  This is often accomplished by making the food less appealing to them, by removing other nutrients likely to turn rancid, like omega-3 fatty acids.  The more processed a food is, the longer the shelf life, and the less nutritious it typically is.  Real food is alive – and therefore should eventually die.  (There are a few exceptions to this rule: For example, honey has a shelf life measured in centuries.)  Note:  Most of the immortal foodlike substances in the supermarket are found in the middle aisles.

OBC Food Rules-Day 12: Shop the Peripheries of the Supermarket and Stay Out of the Middle

Most supermarkets are laid out in the same way.  Processed foods dominate the center aisles of the store, while the cases of more fresh food – produce, meat and fish, dairy – line the walls.  If you keep to the edges of the store, you’ll be much more likely to wind up with real food in your shopping cart.  This strategy is not foolproof, however since things like high-fructose corn syrup have crept into the dairy case under the flavored yogurts and the like.

Food Rules-Day 6: Avoid Food Products that Contain More than 5 Ingredients

The specific number you adopt is arbitrary, but the more ingredients in a packaged food, the more highly processed it probably is.  Note 1: A long list of ingredients in a recipe is not the same thing; that's fine.  Note 2:  Some products now boast, somewhat deceptively, about their short ingredients lists.  Haagen-Dazs has a new line of ice cream called "five".  Great-but it's still ice cream.  Sames goes for the three-ingredient Tostitos corn chips advertised by Frito-Lay - okay, but they're still corn chips.  In such cases, apply rule 60 for dealing with treats and special occasion foods.

Food Rules-Day 5: Avoid Foods that have Some Form of Sugar (or sweetener) Listed Among the Top 3 Ingredients

Labels list ingredients by weight, and any product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar.  (For the exception to this rule, see rule 60, regarding special occasion foods.) Complicating matters is the fact that , thanks to food science, there are now some 40 types of sugar used in processed food, including barley malt, beet sugar, brown rice syrup, cane juice, corn sweetner, dextrin, dextrose, fructo-oligossaccharides, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, sucrose, invert sugar, polydextrose, turbinado sugar, and so on.  To repeat:  Sugar Is Sugar.  And organic sugar is sugar too.  As for noncaloric sweeteners such as aspartame or Splenda, research (in both humans and animals) suggests that switching to artificial sweeteners does not lead to weight loss, for reasons not well yet understood.  But it may be that deceiving the brain with the reward of sweetness stimulates a craving for even more sweetness.