"French Kids Eat Everything"

Stumbled across this article, and thought it made many great points about American attitudes towards food. In particular, this:

Take your time, for both cooking and eating. Slow food is happy food.
-
“North Americans associate food most with health and least with pleasure. The French are at the opposite extreme: they are the most pleasure-oriented and the least health-oriented about food.” And ironically enough “20 percent of kids in the United States are obese, but only 3 percent in France.” Now if that doesn’t send a message, I don’t know what does.

I'd add that Americans need to reorient themselves to what "pleasure" is when it comes to food. There is great pleasure to be had from a well-made meal created from whole ingredients that came from the ground instead of a chemistry lab. We need to re-learn how to appreciate that. (And in my experience, once we do, the highly-processed "foods" aren't quite so pleasurable anymore, so win-win.) Let's stop viewing food as a battle to be won, or a temptation to be vigilantly guarded against. How much would that change?

Check out this book review. Makes me want to read the book.

Processed vs. Whole Foods: Well, I feel validated...

I had a new awareness: it made no sense, in evolutionary terms, to eat things that weren't actually food and expect our bodies to still react in a normal fashion.

I wrote that, so discovering the following video wasn't exactly surprising, really, but it was horrifying.

Stefani Bardin is a TEDxManhattan 2011 Fellow, who conducted small clinical trials using pill cameras to demonstrate how our digestive system reacts differently to processed versus unprocessed foods.  Pay particular attention to her narration, where she explains that some of the ingredients in the processed foods are petrochemicals – that's right, stuff derived from crude oil.

No wonder we can't digest it properly.  See for yourself:

What price do we pay for convenience? Not only do we develop attitudes that cooking is a chore (when it actually can be a part of the social and enjoyment experience of food), but what exactly happens when we absorb petrochemicals instead of nutrients?