Real Foods

I read a review at The Crisper for Nina Blanck's book Read Food: What to Eat and Why. It sounded interesting and so I used my Christmas gift card to Barnes and Noble to purchase it. As of tonight at 9:35 I'm about 40 pages shy of finishing it.

The basic premise of the book is one which I not conly can comprehend, but can fully support: eat as much real food--lean organic beef and chicken, fish, fruits, veggies, whole milk and milk products--as you want, whenever you want it. Meanwhile, limit 'industrial food'--refined sugar and carbs, industrial veggies, fish, chicken and fruits/veggies--as much as possible. As the guy at The Crisper notes:

[Planck's] primarily an advocate of eating the things we’ve been eating for tens of thousands of years. Nothing that comes in a Kraft box, Lipton bag, or from the cereal aisle was around 100,000 years ago. And you cannot simply slap a “Good Source of Calcium” sticker on a box of Hot Pockets and pretend it’s not crap.

Certainly her basic premise is an increasingly common refrain, but Planck doesn't just echo this common food knowledge. Instead she takes an in depth look at the underlying science as to why real food makes sense. She breaks down the importance of fats in brain and muscular development. She outlines methods for balancing one's diet. And finally she abandons the usual "reduced or non-fat" approach and explains the use of fats found only in whole milk/yogurt/cheese in binding protein and vitamins within our bodies. This was by far the most curious point of her book: the real food part makes sense and has been said a hundred times before, the full fat part makes sense the way she laid it out, but is something I have never before heard. I'll follow up on that if I can...

From Planck's site:

Don't you find it odd that the experts blame butter and beef for heart disease, even though heart disease as we know it has only been around since 1912, and we've been eating butter for 30,000 years and beef for 3 million?

Don't you find it funny that the foods in all traditional diets - starting with breast milk - are loaded with saturated fat and cholesterol, yet people who eat these traditional foods liberally don't get heart disease? Nor are they fat or diabetic.

The experts are mistaken. The so-called diseases of civilization - obesity, diabetes, and heart disease - are not caused by real food. The diseases of industrialization - as I call them - are caused by the foods of industrialization.

What are industrial foods? In the triple epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, the three main villains are trans fats, corn oil, and sugar - not butter and eggs.

In Real Food: What to Eat and Why, I explain why traditional foods such as butter are healthy and industrial foods are not. You'll learn how butter, lard, beef, cheese, eggs, and other foods we've been eating for thousands of years got a bad rap - and why it's a bad rap.

Pick up a copy of Real Food: What to Eat and Why if you have even the slightest interest in organic foods, nutrition or body science. It is a very interesting read.