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 35: Eat Sweet Foods as you Would Find them in Nature

In nature, sugars are almost always packaged with fiber, which slows their absorption and gives you a sense of satiety before you've ingested to many calories.  That's why you're always better off eating the fruit rather than drinking it's juice.  (In general, calories taken in liquid form are more fattening because they do not make us feel full.  Humans are one of the very few mammals that obtain calories from liquids after weaning.)  So don't drink your sweets, and remember:  There is no such thing as a healthy soda.

OBC Food Rules-Day 30: Eat Well-Grown Food from Healthy Soil

It would have been easier to say "eat organic" and it is true that food certified organic is usually all grown in relatively healthy soil-soil nourished by organic matter rather than chemical fertilizers.  (It also will contain  little or no residue from synthetic pesticides or pharmaceuticals.)  Yet there are always exceptional farmers and ranchers in America who for one reason or another are not certified organic, and the excellent food they grow should not be overlooked.  (And just because a food is labeled organic, does not mean it's good for you:  Organi soda is still soda-a large quantity of utterly empty calories.)

We now have a body of research supporting the hypothesis, first advanced by organic pioneers Sir Albert Howard and J.I. Rodale, that soils rich in organic matter produce more nutritious food:  that is food with higher leveles of antioxidants, flavanoids, vitamins, and minerals.  Of course, after a few days of rising cross-country in a truck, the nutritional quality of any kind of produce will deteriorate, so ideally you want to eat food that is both organic and local.

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 17: Eat Only Foods that have been Cooked by Humans

If you’re going to let others cook for you, you’re much better off if they are other humans, rather than corporations.  In general, corporations cook with too much salt, fat, and sugar as well as with preservatives, colorings, and other biological novelties.  They also aim for immortality with their food products.  Note:  While it’s true that professional chefs are generally humans, they often cook with large amounts of salt, fat and sugar too, so treat restaurant meals as special occasions. 

The following rules, over the next several days, are a few useful variants on the human-cooked-food rule.