The Nurturing Well by: Jill Starbuck
While eating natural, unprocessed foods is the best diet to follow, it’s often unrealistic to assume we will never eat processed foods. In fact, we eat 31% more packaged food than fresh food. For many, eating packaged food is easier and faster than preparing meals with fresh food. Foods such as frozen pizzas, potato chips, microwave dinners, and others have become staples in many households.
Even though processed food is likely to remain part of our food consumption, we should choose those that have the fewest ingredients. Choose packaged items that have five or fewer ingredients. But more importantly, choose foods that have ingredients you can pronounce. If you can’t pronounce an ingredient, don’t buy it. Many of these ingredients have addictive qualities, making it harder for people to resist.
In addition to choosing products with ingredients you can pronounce, some of those easily pronounced can become diet culprits. This means they can cause unwanted side effects, including diabetes, heart conditions, bloating, obesity, and more. Such ingredients include salt, corn syrup, certain fats, and others. Along with paying attention to the number and types of ingredients in processed food, it’s also a good idea to check ingredients often. For instance, a particular product that you consume often may change ingredients from time to time. An example of this is Breyers ice cream. Breyers was well known for its natural product, with four or five natural ingredients including milk, cream, sugar, and vanilla beans for its vanilla flavor. However, this all changed when Unilever purchased Breyers from Kraft. The ice cream now includes more than five ingredients including those that are hard to pronounce and corn syrup and tara gum. In fact, some of Breyers ice cream is now labeled as frozen dessert rather than ice cream.
Using the Breyers ice cream as an example, how many people who faithfully bought this product for its natural ingredients noticed the change? And if they did, how long did it take them? The message is that we shouldn’t take it for granted that the food we buy will remain the same over time. Food companies continue to find cheaper ways to process food, whether it is for the benefit of our health or not.
Jill Starbuck has 20 years of experience as a business writer, editor, and market research analyst. She is a certified health coach through the Integrative Institute of Nutrition and a certified running coach through the Road Runners Club of America. She is also the co-owner of a running business. She can be reached at jillstarbuck@hotmail.com.
