Food Rules

I read a brilliant article this weekend in the Daily Mail called 'Food Rules' - I thought I'd share some of the highlights! Many of them are common sense, but then that's all healthy eating really is!

1. Avoid food grandma wouldn't recognise
There are now thousands of food products in the supermarket that our ancestors wouldn't recognise. They are processed in ways specifically designed to get us to buy and eat more by pushing our evolutionary buttons (such as our inborn preferences for sugar, fat and salt). These tastes are difficult to find in nature, but cheap and easy for scientists to deploy, with the result that food processing induces us to consume more of these products than is good for us.

2. It's NOT food if it has the same name in all languages
Think 'Big Mac' or 'Pringles'!

3. Avoid ingredients you don't recognise
Enhoxylated diglycerides? Cellulose? Xanthan gum? Calcium propionate? Ammonium sulfate? If you wouldn't cook with these additives yourself, why let others use these ingredients to cook for you? Foods scientists use these to extend shelf life and make old food look fresher and more appetising than it really is. Many of these additives haven't been eaten by humans for very long, so it's questionable whether they prove a health risk or not.

4. Question food labelled 'low-fat'
Removing fat from foods doesn't necessarily make them non-fattening. Carbohydrates can also make you fat, many low-fat and non-fat foods are more sugary to make up for the loss of flavour. You're better off eating the real thing in moderation than bingeing on 'lite' food products packed with sugars and salt.

5. 'The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead'
This blunt advise is a reminder of the health risks of white flour. As far as our body is concerned, white flour is not much differnt from sugar.

6. Eat your colours
The colours of many vegetables reflect the different antioxidant phytochemicals they contain. Many of these chemicals help to protect against chronic diseases, but each in a slightly different way, so the best protection comes from a diet containing as many different phytochemicals as possible.

7. Eat slowly
Eat slowly enough to savour your food, you'll need less of it and you'll feel satisfied.

8. Avoid long lists of ingredients
Again, the more ingredients in a food, the more highly processed it probably is. (A long list of ingredients in a recipe is not the same; that's fine).

9. Eat when you're hungry, not when you're bored
For many, eating has surprisingly little to do with hunger. We eat out of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. One old wives test: if you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you're not hungry!

10. Only eat food that rot
The more processed a food is, the longer the shelf life, and the less nutritious it typically is. Real food is alive - and therefore should eventually die. (One of the exceptions is honey, which has a shelf life measured in centuries).

11. Don't refuel at petrol stations
Food sold at petrol stations is all highly processed - imperishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened drinks.

12. Treats treats and treats
There's nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day isn't a special occasion. Chips, pastries and ice-cream offer some of the greatest pleasure in life, so we shouldn't deprive ourselves of them, but our sense of occasion needs to be restored.

For more help and advise with your nutrition visit www.insideouttrraining.co.uk