Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

So I've been reading "In Defense of Food" (by the same guy who wrote "The Omnivore's Dilemma," which I've never read, but everyone's heard of it) and it's making me mad because it's telling me what I already KNOW I should be doing, only so bluntly that it's hard to keep ignoring it. His mantra is what I put in the subject -- we should all be eating REAL food, not anything processed or chopped into a million pieces and put back together with added nutrients and vitamins, because once you take things apart you're going to miss some of the little pieces. After 150 years of nutritionism (his word for the near-religious approach to thinking of food as a collection of nutrients, rather than a whole) we still haven't figured out what is important, and even if they give a diet with exactly equivalent nutrients to some whole food, the people eating the whole food end up healthier and thinner and so on relative to those who eat the sum of the parts. And we shouldn't eat too much (obviously), and we evolved on a mostly plant-based diet, and by dropping all those leafy greens from our diet we've left something important out. People eating real food diets have lower rates of obesity, cancer, diabetes, and heart problems, even from widely varied cultures (and hence widely varied real foods -- there's no perfect diet). He doesn't really address the exercise side of things -- the people in those cultures tend also to be more active (though even in cigarette-heavy countries their health problems are fewer) -- but what he says makes good sense, and, as I said, it's hard to ignore.

And we all eat too much sugar. Too much refined sugar in particular -- he does mention glycemic index but that's not part of his core thesis; the point is, when you refine sugar, you lose the whole-foods aspect of the original sugar plant and you're not getting what little nutrition you might have gotten. But even if you use raw sugar it's only a marginal improvement. Too much sugar. Sigh... (I love sugar.)

So now I'm trying to pay more attention to what is in the foods we eat. I haven't finished the book yet, so I may revise my thinking before the end. But I'd already switched my bread; when I came back from Norway I found the processed breads (even the expensive whole wheat ones) too depressing to eat, so I started buying the whole wheat bread from the bakery. But one day we needed bread that day -- and I realized it at breakfast time, and I didn't want to go to the grocery store -- so I made it in the bread machine. The response from the kids was so overwhelmingly positive that they've started complaining when I suggest I might buy bread, so now not only am I making bread from whole grains, I'm making it from scratch. (And, alas, with refined sugars -- there are plenty of recipes with honey or molasses or no sugar at all, so I'm sure I can adapt my plain whole wheat bread machine recipe, but today I was adding oats to the plain whole wheat recipe and I didn't want to change two things at once; next time I'll use molasses or even raw sugar instead of brown sugar.)

And, as I posted this weekend, I was already changing eggs. I didn't buy free-range, but cage-free grain-fed, which isn't quite the same thing (the author argues that you want your animal food sources to have a varied diet, too, if you're going to have more nutrition in YOUR food), but at least these chickens didn't come from an "industry standard" disease- and fecal-matter-infested henhouse. Even if they weren't killing me, I don't want to reward that level of grodiness. Ick.

We're trying some new breakfast cereals this week. I discovered, to my surprise, that the cereals on the natural foods aisle have (1) FAR fewer ingredients on their lists, having left out all the additives and preservatives (though not always the refined sugar and oat fiber (another food taken out of its whole food), but it's usually raw sugar, at least), (2) nearly identical styles to the cereals on the cereals aisle (there is a Reese's equivalent, though not a Lucky Charms equivalent that I saw), and (3) comparable prices to the main cereal aisle, since cereal prices leapt to outrageous levels several years ago after a price-fixing scandal or something and never came back down. So there's no excuse for me to keep eating that stuff.

I also realized most of our dinners aren't too bad. I'll need to start soaking kidney beans instead of buying them canned, because the canned ones are in corn syrup, but I usually plan chili a day or two in advance, so that will be cheaper and no big deal. White corn comes with added sugar, too -- but I can't find white corn in the freezer section and I can't digest yellow corn, so I think I'm stuck on that one for now, or until I start canning my own corn (as if!). But the rest of our canned goods are fine. (NOT counting the kids' ravioli and Mary's lunch soups -- but I don't eat those, and they don't eat much; I'll just stop buying those.) I can do better about using brown rice instead of white, but I'm already most of the way there on that one. Pastas and noodles will take some thought, but I found that most of the whole wheat pastas don't have long additive ingredient lists, even on the normal aisle (the Kroger brands aren't too great, though); however, I get rebellions with whole wheat pastas. Maybe Daniel will be more receptive this time.

I'm getting a fair amount of support from Daniel on this because the evidence from his family is kind of overwhelming. Among his grandparents, there were three major cases of heart disease and the fourth one developed cancer. His mother had cancer. His father has serious colon troubles. His brother, only 44, has colon cancer now. Daniel is in better shape than his brother and his mother but not his father, so the only thing he can hope to improve on over his father is his diet. Alexander is doomed -- there isn't a man in his family tree who hasn't had heart troubles (no -- his paternal grandfather just has colon troubles that I know of-- but Alexander's doomed on those, too). We're already working with the kids on exercise, but I think diet changes will help, too.

The "mostly plants" thing I haven't figured out yet. He hasn't addressed the specifics of that as far as I've gotten, except to say that historically we ate more plants than animal products and that we should think of meat as a side dish, not the main course. I'm trying to get more seafood in our diet (a frequent resolution of mine that has yet to take effect) but I'm not sure about how to cut back on dairy products much more than we have, without a radical change, or how to eliminate meat from my regular lunch diet.

I'm making these changes gradually; I'm not going to throw out all the white sugar and flour. Or all the ice cream in the freezer. Or the cupcakes Cecilia and I made this weekend. I refuse to bypass birthday cakes (WITH icing, but I'm happy to have that icing made with butter, not Crisco) or Halloween candy (refined sugar ten times over, but a necessity of life) or Christmas cookies (but the lebkuchen at least use honey instead of sugar, for the most part). But I can do more homemade stuff, with better ingredients.

And I'm not expecting my weight to miraculously drop even if I do switch to better foods. The "Not too much" is an important part of this -- though he points out that if we're eating whole foods we're getting the things that tell our bodies we're full, the things that are generally left out of foods like, say, jellybeans or candy corn, allowing us to eat entire bags straight (not that I would ever do such a thing...). So we're less likely to overeat as much. But the author also says that even if we DO eat all whole foods, we're not likely to get the same nutrition we would have 200 years ago, because all these foods have been bred for quantity, not quality, and the range of nutrition and opportunities for variety are long gone. So not only do I need to eat less sugar, I need to eat less, period. More depressing news that isn't really news.

Thank you for reading this far, if you've made it! I'll be happy to loan out the book when I'm finished, so you all can be as depressed as I am about how one's diet should change. (I LIKE sugar. I LIKE white flour, at least in many things. I don't WANT to change.) And if I loan out the book then I won't have it around so maybe in six weeks or months or so its effects will wear off and I can go back to my old bad habits. (Except for the eggs. Ew.)