Real Food?

"Eat real food", Michael Pollen's advice seems reasonable and makes sense in terms of following a healthier diet. Real food is food that mostly looks like it's constituent parts. Vegetables, fruits, meats and grains are all real foods. Real foods don't require an ingredient label because they really don't have ingredients, they just are what they are. If a food does have ingredients, a real food has recognizable and pronounceable ingredients and not many of them either.

So what did I have for lunch today? Soy Protein Isolate, Chicory Syrup, Brown Rice Syrup, Evaporated Cane Juice, Palm Kernel Oil, Rolled Oats, Almond Butter, the list goes on, and on. My Builder's Bar is touted as "The Entirely Natural Protein Bar" but I don't think it really qualifies as real food.

Why was I eating this for lunch? Because I once again got involved in a project and didn't leave myself time to eat and get to my next appointment. My choice of lunch might have been better than something from a fast food outlet but after the soy protein the next three ingredients are all just fancy organic names for sugar and the next after that is fat. For the sake of brevity I didn't list the large number of vitamins and minerals that were also added to my bar in an attempt to make it "healthy", but I'm sure you can imagine it also went on and on.

In all fairness these bars are not intended to be a meal replacement, and my using it as such is just because I ran out of time. It does however reinforce two issues. The first is the fact that eating real food takes time. Time to shop, time to prep and time to cook. If I am committed to healthy eating I need to make the time to actually do it.

The second issue is that there are far more industrially created food-like options out there than real food. Add as many ingredients as you want, natural or not, they still aren't food, and they still are not as satisfying as real food. The natural foods folks would like us to believe that these products are somehow better for us, yet they have the same high sweetness and fat content as other convenience foods. These products are just as designed and manufactured as the stuff in the next aisle, it's just labeled and marketed to a different niche.

Tomorrow, if I want to have a lunch with plenty of protein, carbohydrates and lots of vitamins and minerals, I think I'll have some soup and maybe a sandwich. I just need to make the time.