Think about the foods you eat on a regular basis. How fresh are they? Are they preserved? Did they come from a box? A bag? Do you know whether the 'food' has been prepared by a person versus a machine?- Does that matter?
FOOD STUFF
Refers to items that are being advertised as food, but straying from the original ingredients. Foodstuff is refined, fortified, includes ingredients from a lab, pasteurized, irritated, preserved, sitting in front of us no longer as fresh food, but rather food STUFF. Perhaps appealing via marketing, flashy colours, slogans and a deliciously perfect, and researched, flavour triad of fat, sugar and salt.
Why may foodstuff be important to identify in our diet? Our body is hungry for nutrients. Nutrients are naturally present in fresh foods, the longer we wait after harvesting a food, the more nutrients are degraded and lost.
Food stuff satisfies our initial cravings but doesn't carry the natural balance of nutrients, enzymes, bacteria, fibre and water to assist our body through balanced digestion. Have you ever eaten a whole bag of chips, or a whole sleeve of Oreo's and only once its was gone, think: oh snap- I just ate too much!
A consistent consumption of food stuff can leave the body malnourished of nutrients naturally found in whole fresh foods, and it's these nutrients that our body needs for optimal functioning.
For example: upon the introduction to refining and pasteurizion, at the industrial revolution, wide spread deficiency symptoms occured across the population. This drove the need to fortify some of our most commonly consumed ingredients- e.g. white flour, milk.
Is the rise in degenerative/auto immune, cancers, respiratory, dis-ease as a whole, in part due to our population's increasing dependence and ignorant consumption of food stuff, rather, than whole fresh foods?
Knowing how to use fresh ingredients TO CREATE a meal or cure an ailment is a basic skill directly relating to the long-term health of our population.
Let's learn to boil roots first, before running to a doctor, as over-the-counters might not always be available or affordable! Let's not be absolutely reliant on our rapidly growing grid. Let's rely on a foundation of knowledge about the human body and how to survive on this planet.
How to identify food stuff:
Mass / commercially processed foods have time and time again proven their passion for money over the health of their consumers. We have seen this across many consumer product industries, beauty, tobacco, clothing, and food, where companies use the most economical ingredients, and use of chemicals, preservatives, and additives.
Ingredients we can watch out for on our food labels:
See, I used to have a list here of all the things I don't like to see on a label. But honestly there is a time and a place for everything in my opinion.
In my lifestyle I don't like to insight fear or absolutes. Generally I like labels with words I can recognize, and ingredients I could realistically have in my own home.
In our home we like to shop minimally, use fresh foods as they come and go, adjusting meals according to the season. We like to "shop the perimeter" of the grocery store and hit up specialty shops such as butcher shoppes, bakeries and farmer's markets.
QUALITY over QUANITY is something I always try to remember when we are shopping. I ask myself: have we used up what we already have? Do we need this?
Thanks for reading,
Samantha
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