This blog is about intuitive eating, giving up on dieting and eating unprocessed foods. Eating only unprocessed foods, but then following intuitive eating (which states eat whatever you want) may sound like counter-intuitive eating. Yet, it is almost impossible to do when processed foods are eaten. Yesterday, I felt like tomatoes boiled down into a tomato sauce on freshly made pizza with fresh pineapples and ham. But as I looked for canned tomatoes the same ingredient kept popping up – acidity regulator 303. Well, I may have felt like tomatoes, pineapples, ham or pizza, but I certainly don’t remember having a craving for acidity regulator 303. Eating intuitively involves eating what you feel like and having what your body craves. I have come to believe that processed food (and remember this was pretty much unprocessed tomatoes in a can) has so many hidden ingredients it actually prevents you from eating inuitively since other hidden ingredients get a free ride.
Additionally, eating processed foods is not good for our health. Many hunter-gatherer societies, and modern day tribal farmers, have been shown to lack any of the modern diseases of civilisation – cancer, heart disease, diabetes. This, despite their diets been very high in fat (incl. saturated fat) and protein and low in carbohydrates, almost the complete opposite of the USDA food pyramid guidelines. This I think is the key, modern day foods are not natural, and are highly processed and artificial. Eating these foods messes with our internal hunger cues, and the way our body functions. It was only when I eliminated these processed foods that I was able to eat intuitively. For example, I found that when I ate modern processed foods I was hungry all the time. However, when I started to eat natural foods, my hunger levels became much more manageable and I was able to start eating intuitively. I could stop when I was full, but more importantly I could tell when I was full.
So I have named this blog ‘Food Chains’. This can have two meanings. Firstly, I have felt that food has ‘chained’ me down my whole life through dieting and subsequent disordered thinking. So I want to break those ‘chains’ by no longer dieting. But I also want to try to do this as healthily as possible, which leads me to my next meaning – I believe that eating industrialised, and heavily processed, food has broken the natural food chains that we have evolved to be supported by. This is to the detriment of our health. Thus, one of my goals is to try and get back to eating as natural and unprocessed food as possible, and to do this in an intuitive eating manner. So thats it…..food chains – the body acceptance, intuitive eating and no more processed food blog.
Hi Dan,
You can get information sheets on what all the additives are. Some of them are perfectly normal and not chemicals we wouldn’t otherwise eat. 303 is potassium ascorbate, which is just vitamin C. Even home-canned or preserved foods have a little bit of something like that, such as citric acid (additive #330), added to them to help control bacteria growth and, as it was put on those labels, keep the pH of the food in the right range for good preserving. Even if you went to an organic farmer’s market and bought someone’s Nonna’s home-made tomato sauce it would probably have an additive like this.
http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/foodmatters/foodadditives.cfm
I’d reckon about 3/4 of the additives are normal ingredients that have always been used in home cooking, or occur in for naturally, and are nothing to worry about.
Some others that sound worrying are actually quite interesting when you look them up. Polyethylene glycol (additive 1521), for instance, has actully been shown to suppress colon cancer in lab rats and they’re looking at how that might work on humans.
And some additives that are ‘unnatural’ are in fact perfectly harmless (like methylcellulose, which is completely ignored by the body), and some that are ‘natural’ can produce allergic-like reactions in some people (like annatto, 160b, used in margarines and smoked fish).
So we can end up with some heavily-processed foods that actually have little in the way of ‘artificial’ additives, and then some fairly unprocessed foods that sound like they’re a chemical factory. It’s all a matter of figuring out which additives you believe are OK to go in food and which you’d rather avoid. For instance, I’ll happily eat TVP (textured vegetable protein, which is basically pureed, de-fatted, dried processed soy beans) but not anything with #163, which is derived from red grape skins and causes a rhinitis reaction in me. And of course I won’t eat anything with dead-animal products, like all those low-fat yoghurts with gelatine. I think they taste awful anyway.
Nice blog too! I hope you can keep up with your intuitive eating challenge, it’s worth it. I think you had a long comment from someone recently including about how exercise is really great for learning about your hunger, and I agree there! I’ve been doing lots of strength training recently and found I eat a lot more carbs and only a little more protein, and a little less fat, which I mostly seem to get from eggs and nuts now. I thought about it and it’s actually logical since when you work out intensely like that, you deplete your glucose/glycogen stores from the bloodstream and liver, and if you don’t put some glucose right back in afterwards, your liver starts converting protein to glucose, but you need the protein for muscle restoration and building. The human body is pretty awesome.
Whew, sorry for the long comment! I can talk the ear off something that doesn’t have ears.