I love runners. I’ve even tried to be one. I went from someone who could not fathom the concept of running for enjoyment to somebody who would spontaneously break out in to a jog across campus, not because I was … Continue reading
We’re approaching the mid-point of my stepson’s AYSO soccer season. I can happily say that he is one of the stand-out players on the team. The only problem is that he doesn’t have much competition for the distinction. At … Continue reading
The rules no eater should be without.
We all love food. No creature on Earth is indifferent when it comes to filling up on the finest available fare. But what is food exactly. Until recently, even the medical community didn’t pay much attention to what FOOD is exactly. In his book Food Rules, Michael Pollan suggests we “Eat Food”. He goes on to say further that most of what we see on the shelves in our markets is food-like substance. He proposes that we ask ourselves one simple question about the food staring at us from or plate. “Would your grandmother recognize this as food?” For some things we feed ourselves (or worse yet, our kids) it is pretty easy to identify the food-impostors. The problem is when we think we are buying something healthy and it’s really just a stripped down food item with a bunch of healthy sounding additives made in a laboratory, molded in to shapes that resembles real food. And you thought you were playing make-believe when, as a child, you whipped up a batch of those play doh hot dogs for all to enjoy.
I recently attended the Healthy People Conference at Loma Linda University. This years slogan was “The Food Factor”. This struck me as a bit telling of the ten-foot-pole with which modern medicine and public health at large deal with the actual food of the population. Sure we’ve had Registered Dietitians and Clinical Nutritionists in hospitals for decades now but they either deal with the single macro/micro nutrients or caloric intake of their patients. It was quite a sight to hear how top authorities in medicine and public health were fumbling with the terms”organic” and “non-GMO” as if these were two of the most mysterious of medical technologies.
Being the guerilla health and fitness warrior that I am, I decided to take up the phrase of our 40th President,”Trust but verify“. I started asking some of the MDs, PhDs and MPHs buzzing around the expo hall what their definition of Real Food is. The responses were as varied as if I had asked their favorite color. It got me thinking that if these medical professionals had no idea what real food is, how can the general public have a clue?
The next day, I took to the books on my shelves and scoured the internet to see how others identify real food. Here are some popular definitions of real food from health and fitness professionals in print and across the internet:
Can I imagine it growing?
Even the most conscious calorie-counter or label-reader still gives little thought to the fact that their food was once alive in one way or another. We are overwhelmed by the subjective experience of eating (as we should be; food is meant to be enjoyed) that we fail to consider that our food was once a living, eating and breathing organism. It is important to not only scrutinize the food you eat but also the food your food ate….and the food your foods food ate….and so on.
This book will bring family time back to the kitchen and the dinner table.
Just as it is impossible to be healthy by eating sick animals, it is equally impossible to be good stewards of the life gifted to you by your food by their ultimate sacrifice if you are not fully aware of the pice paid. I hope someday we would require that food packaging include an actual picture of the animal, or plant growing in nature; not so that we be discouraged from eating it, but so we fully appreciate the sacrifice made so that we may be nourished. The harsh reality of this world is that it takes life to give life.
In her brilliant book, Feeding the Whole Family, Cooking with Whole Foods. Cynthia Lair of cookus interruptus asks, “Can I imagine [my food] growing” as a handy little way to teach young and old how to identify real food. This is a great stand-alone question to keep in mind as you stroll down the aisles of your mega-mart. For me, this goes a bit beyond the popular suggestion to shop the perimeter of the store…after all, you can find this and this along the perimeter of the store even though they are perfectly stable in the center aisles. Real food goes bad quickly. Grocery stores now place food-like substances along the perimeters right next to real foods in order to trick the eater.
If it wasn’t around 10,000 years ago, it’s not real food.
Easy to follow, easy to read Primal tips for a healthy life.
Mother Nature has experimented with an infinite number of genetic traits and characteristics in every branch of the genetic tree. We all know all of life evolved from single-cell organisms. Some grew legs, some wings, others fins. Some adapted to eating flesh while others put more genetic stock in to their GI system, giving them the ability to digest and absorb plant nutrients efficiently. We as a species distinguished ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom 200,000 to 100,000 years ago. Since then, our genome has changed very little with respect to how we eat.
Mark Sisson explains in his book, The Primal Blueprint, that our primal ancestors who hunted and gathered this Earth around 10,000 years ago were bigger, stronger, faster and more full of life than we are today. Although we possess greater knowledge today, they had bigger brains than the modern human.
So what changed 10,000 years ago? Agriculture. We thought we could beat the system. We stopped moving around as much and tried to replaced our animal-based calories with plant-based calories. I say attempted because we need only look at the health of both us and the Earth to see the result of that 10,000 year old experiment. Our general state of health and the now barren “fertile crescent” serve to exemplify the gradual taking of life that goes along with mass agriculture.
Please do not read this and think Mark and I think that plants are not real food. The simple truth is that we humans do a lot of thinking. Our brains are calorically expensive to run. Feeding our bodies solely on plants is something to which we are not well adapted. The artificial abundance of plant calories available in the food supply is detrimental to our health. (remember the plant material I speak of is mainly grains and not leafy vegetation) If you wish to go out to a meadow and shovel fistfuls of wheat in to your mouth, by all means, do it. Chances are you won’t enjoy it. It is only through our supposed ingenuity and invention of the millstone that we have artificially made something otherwise unpalatable, in to the staff of life.
I’d be remiss if I led the reader to believe that Marks book is simply a diet book. He succinctly explains in great detail how to enjoy the luxuries of modern life while maintaining the health and happiness of our ancestors by applying the 10 laws of the Primal Blueprint.
Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food
-Hippocrates
Until the modern age, food was regarded as the primary source of medicine. It is only through our conscious dissociation between what we eat and how we subsequently feel that has allowed us to ignore this eternal truth. Hippocrates is credited with having said these famous words thousands of years ago. By contrast, the US Surgeon General didn’t officially acknowledge the value of a good diet with respect to ones health until 1988. Still today the best your doctor can do in the way of dietary guidance is regurgitate some industry funded and government endorsed research that employs standardized formulas and one-size-fits-all guidelines shown to be good for “most people”. I don’t blame the doctors nor the system however it’s foolish for us as individuals to gamble with our health and hope we land somewhere at the top of that bell curve shown in the study. Your food is the most intimate object your body will ever encounter. Why we let somebody else tell us what our bodies need is beyond me.
Healing with Whole Foods includes complete sections on Ayurvedic principles of food—combining; the treatment of disease conditions through meals
The traditional Whole Medical Systems of the East are uniquely suited to explain and execute therapy through real food. The Indian subcontinent spans such a range of elevation and latitude that it contains every type of climate on the rest of the planet. Through this diversity the indigenous people have had thousands of years to experiment with the myriad of vegetables and herbs native to their land.
Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine alike designate certain qualities, characteristics and actions to foods. If you have a cold, only a warm food such as chicken soup can help you come back in to balance. It is an intuitive and uncomplicated way to look at food and realize its full potential. These intrinsic qualities and potencies are mitigated as the food is removed further from its true nature. This could be done by genetically altering the genome, growing it out of season, feeding it something other than its natural diet, etc. This disconnect with nature can also take place if food is heated beyond stability. This happens with oils, milk (through pasteurization) and bottled water baked in their plastic containers in warehouses across the country. These otherwise real foods are chemically altered to improve shelf life and inflate a profit margin for some entity involved.
Normally I try to abstain from “circle-of-life” type arguments because I just end up breaking in to song and never get any work done. This time, there simply is no other way to describe the holy dynamic that is the way in which we nourish ourselves and sustain our own lives. Try as we may, we can not scientifically explain how intense energy burning light-years away from us becomes the infinitely unique life-form you think you are. When does life start; be it you own, your foods, your foods food, your foods food food, and so on? If you want to feel alive, you have to eat that which is filled with life.
My definition for real food involves understanding this cycle. There is a set amount of life-force available in the world. This is a concept known as Chi (or Qi) in TCM and Prana in Vedic traditions (Yoga, Ayurveda, etc). Since the creation of the universe there has not been any addition no subtraction of life-force to the system. If you care not to have such a broad metaphysical approach, suffice it to say that as far as the individual is concerned, the amount of life-force he or she will take in and give out is part of a zero-sum game. That said, if you trace back the journey of the meal you will eat tonight, you could give an honest evaluation of how it got there and who exactly profited and lost in the process. By my standards, if anybody involved disproportionately gained or lost, from the fowl to the farmer, your meal is not made of real food.
This seems a little stringent but consider it on a grander scale. If anything is done to synthetically amplify the eternally present amount of life in a fruit, vegetable or animal, the nutritional integrity is compromised. The profit of the farmer or food supplier must be paid by someone else in the system. Who pays that bill?…you do. After the food-like substance is “laundered” through your body, year after year, your medical bills start to pile up. Remember, there is and will always be a set amount of life-force available in the universe. If somebody tilts the scale in their favor, someone else will come up short. It may take years and sometimes even generations, but as we continue to insist that we can sustain life from lifeless food, we will be met with the cold reality that is our collective decline in vitality and health.
Plato was given his nickname by his wrestling coach due to his broad shoulders. (Platon = broad)
“In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, man can attain perfection.”
-Plato
Apparently even those iconic Ancient Greeks needed to be reminded to get to the gym from time to time. As I stated in my blog post on the recent USDA/NHS Dietary Guidelines for Americans, we seem to be an extremely health conscious people; we just seem to have the (potato) chips stacked against us when it comes to the quality of food and information made available to us by the one-size-fits-all establishments. We depend on the allied health authorities such as the AMA, USDA, ACSM, and ACE to not only inform us of the proper way to exercise but also to continually give us evidence based reasons to exercise. It is useless to know how to do something effectively if you have no good reason for doing it in the first place. For better or for worse, the inspirational message from both our governmental and health authorities as well as the commercial fitness industry is any one or combination of the following; “Get fit to get healthy, live longer, have more sex, look great, or get up off the floor“ Though these threats to our safety and appeal to our primal urges seem powerful enough to get us active, they are not good sources of permanent and meaningful behavior change motivation. All of these factors deal largely with the physical body.
A healthy conceptualization of exercise is one that sees the adaptation of the physiology and physique of the body merely as side effects of a life in motion. Exercise should be seen as a medicine for the entire being, not just your buns and thighs. It is no surprise, however, that these objective indicators are the focus of both our esthetic and health goals. They are measurable.
Dr. John Ratey is a practicing Clinical psychiatrist and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who is working to quantify this mind/body connection. He successfully prescribes exercise for everything from ADHD, mood disorder, addiction, menopause and Alzheimer’s. His therapy is based off the latest in medical research that links the physiological benefits of exercise to real psychological improvement. He articulates this mission in his latest book, Spark:
“What I aim to do here is to deliver in plain English the inspiring science connecting exercise and the brain… I want to cement the idea that exercise has a profound impact on cognitive abilities and mental health. It is simply one of the best treatments we have for most psychiatric problems.”
When people think of the effect of exercise on one’s mood, they often think of the transient rush of endorphins known as “runners high”. Dr. Ratey maps out exactly how in addition to these feel-good chemicals running through the movers blood, there is also a great increase in utilization of proteins like IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor) , BDNF (brain derived neurotropic factor) and VEGF (vaso-endothelial growth factor) for lasting positive effect. Although these hormones are always present, Dr. Ratey explains how exercise effectively blasts these through the blood/brain barrier and causes psycological adaptation; just like exercise causes muscular adaptation. The suggestion is that the primary objective of animal movement is to “work-out” the brain and improve functions of learning, reasoning and emotional affinity.
This is a very interesting concept when you think of it on an evolutionary level. There was a period of time when all living species only had a sophisticated spinal cord. Why did mother nature, through natural selection, decide to develop that mass of nerves rather than give the organism legs, or fangs, or something else a little more useful? 
NYU neurophysiologist Rodolfo Llinas asserts that only a mobile creature needs a brain. In his book, I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self, he tells the story of a sea squirt that starts life mobile then, once it roots itself in some coral, eats its own brain. Llinas interprets from this that, “That which we call thinking is the evolutionary internalization of movement.”
When it comes to exercise, the end is not as important as the means. You can move your body for whichever reason it is that suits you. As a rule, I usually counter all health advice by saying that no one thing is good for everybody. Exercise is probably the only exception. It makes absolutely no difference your reasoning for starting an exercise program as to how your health will improve. Once started, however, the adherence to the program does suffer as those superficial motivators either become less important or the initial goal is achieved. When done properly, exercise changes the psychology of the person so much so that you actually want to work out. Realizing that our main purpose for having the ability to move is to nourish the brain can not only be new motivation to become a mover but also may serve as a more permanent carrot at the end of your stick. Let us hope we just don’t “over-think” ourselves with our improved cognition and snap the stick in half to get the carrot.
