In Defense of Your SKIN: Eat Real Food

Hello Everyone,

I know, I know, I know. I'm supposed to be talking about your skin and aging and healthy personal care products.

Well, I am. And the more I read, the more I know that it all begins with what you're putting in your mouth! And on your skin.

Ok. Today discussion is based on the writings of Michael Pollan. I've just finished his latest book: In Defense of Food. Funny title you might think. Why would food need defending? Because so little Real food is available these days. Slowly and gradually over the last 30-40 years beginning with the industrialization of farming (movement from small local farms to large industrial farms), the food supply in America has been seriously altered by genetic modification, synthetic pesticides and herbicides. We now have really cheap food and we're all really sick. Well done indeed.

Now. Before I go any further, I don't deal in fear, so this is not to scare you, but to inform you.
I can't help but think than anyone over 40 has noticed that weird things have been appearing in food to the point that you might wonder if it is, indeed, Real food or "engineered food products".

Listening to Pollan's book today, he recites the ingredients in a loaf of Sara Lee White Bread. It's baffling. When I was growing up bread had: flour, yeast, eggs, milk, and salt. That's 5 whole ingredients. Just five. That's it. It took about 2-3 hours to make a batch of bread without a machine. And it was immensely pleasurable in the making, in the baking and in the eating.
This loaf of Sara Lee bread had about 36 ingredients in it, many of which, unless you were a chemist, you wouldn't be able to pronounce let alone be sure what it was.

What I don't understand is this: wouldn't you think 5 ingredients would be a lot less trouble and cost than "manufacturing" a loaf of bread? It hardly makes any sense to me.

Enough about the bread. The point is that so many things are going into "food products" that they can scarcely (and should not be) categorized as food any longer. Thanks of course to the FDA, they get away with it. These "engineered food products" are such that they have replaced and supplanted Real nutrition. And Real Nutrition can only be found in Real food.

You might ask why? Because anything whole, natural and Real from nature is complete as it was intended for it to be. Whilst the "engineered food products" are composites of single nutrients extracted and they added back in. It's kinda like a Real Whole Food is a winning Team. It has all the players in it that make it a great Team: the defense, the offense, the cheerleaders, the front office, the back office, the stadium, the whole package. And the sum of the parts (everybody involved) is greater than the individual parts. A single quarterback, for example, couldn't make a touchdown without the line and the blocking. But there wouldn't be a game if there were the owners and the stadium.) Oh, please let me stop with this football thing. But you get the picture.

Engineered Food Products are like taking one or two players and a couple of the seats from the stadium and putting those only into the product. All the synergies are lost. Maybe it's the cheerleaders that turn on the power of the lineman? Or perhaps it's the fans in the seats that trigger the owners. There are a zillion interactions in the chemistry of food that rely on the presence of the other nutrients. In Engineered Food Products, those critical interactions are lost, and therefore the nutrition is lost to our bodies.

How many extra supplements are you taking now to replace the missing nutrition that you're not getting from your food? And it takes a wide variety of foods to give you the wide variety of nutrition and synergies that your body (all of it, skin included) needs.

So here's some reading for you to do: In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma; and the Biology of Desire. All three are written by Michael Pollan and I promise you no dry reads, either. He's entertaining and practical and wise all in one. He even suggest a way out of the tyranny of nutritionism (his word) and back to the enjoyment (ye gads) of food once again and restored health....and beauty. Truly a bold idea.

Thanks for reading!

Kath