Legible Foodie Review: Part 1.

Food is alive. 

Well, not all food.  In fact most of what many of us eat is very dead... (insert Dickens' simile).  Therefore, I propose an amendment to my initial phrase:

Food should be alive. 

I recently went to the Barnes in search of a book that would assist me in choosing foods that will improve my health instead of maim it.  I found what I was looking for in Dr. Don Colbert’s Eat This and Live!

Here’s the deal – I eat a lot of food in one week, and I want that food to mean something.  I want it to aide my body and provide it with needed nutrients instead of pummeling it with wasted, harmful calories.  What I eat matters to me, and my body will react when it doesn’t get what it needs.  Most of the time when I’m hungry at 8 or 9 at night, looking for pretzels, crackers or my ultimate downfall – ice cream; it’s because I had a lousy dinner of “dead” food, as Colbert would say.  My body is not hungry just for food, it’s hungry for the certain nutrients and vitamins it never got at 6 o’clock. 

That’s the big difference between food that is dead and alive.  Food that is alive is raw, whole, fresh, and in or close to its natural state.  Dead food is processed, preserved, and void of nutritional value.  Before I began to read, I thought I was already doing pretty well at eating food that is alive, because I strive to be a locavore as much as possible and eat a very well-balanced diet.  Surprisingly, I found I didn’t fully understand the concept of living food, and I still have much room to improve.

Here’s what Colbert has to say on the subject:

“Living foods – fruits, vegetables, grains seeds and nuts – exist in a raw or close-to-raw state and are beautifully packaged in divinely created wrappers called skins and peels.  Living foods look robust, healthy, and alive.  They have not been bleached, refined, or chemically enhanced and preserved.  Living foods are plucked, harvested, and squeezed – not processed, packaged, and put on a shelf.  Living foods are recognizable as food. 

Dead foods are the opposite.  They have been altered in every imaginable way to make them last as long as possible and be as addictive as possible.  That usually means the manufacturer adds considerable amounts of sugar and manmade fats that involve taking various oils and heating them to dangerously high temperatures so that the nutrients die and become reborn as something completely different – a deadly, sludgy substance that is toxic to our bodies.”

Most of the above makes sense and is not ground breaking to me.  It’s just a necessary reminder and kick in the pants to start or continue to eat better, living food.  The part that was very interesting to me deals with the excessive heating of oils and the toxic products that result in these all-too-common practices – and that topic deserves its own post at a later date.

In order to make my favorite high school English teacher wince as I write my last paragraph:

In summation, make your food count.  This is one of the reasons for the recent shift toward whole grain everything, and “natural” this or that.  Eat a colorful salad, forego the drive-thru and bypass that morning doughnut.  Incorporate a high-fiber breakfast into your routine, switch to whole grain, unbleached, unbromated flour for baking, and for cryin’ out loud, eat an apple!  Foods should be alive, and they are the foods that should dominate our food lives, fridge, cupboards, and stomachs.  Eat them, and live!