Why it’s so important to eat “real” food
Inside your digestive system, you have all of the equipment – digestive enzymes, for example – with which to break down and extract the energy and nutrients from the food you eat.
Your food is the only way your body obtains energy for you to use and experience. Think about that for a minute. With everything you choose to consume you have the opportunity to build energy through feeding your body nutrients that it converts to energy (and many other important biochemical functions) or miss that opportunity by consuming something that is less nourishing.
We forget sometimes that the key to better energy, greater vitality and a focused mind lies squarely in our own hands. Of course there are other factors that contribute to all of those things however nutrients lay the foundations.
When you are tired, everything is more difficult. It impacts on the food that you choose, whether you get off the couch and go for a walk or not, the jobs that you would apply for, the friends you make, your self-talk and the way you speak to the people you love most in the world.
When it comes to food, nature gets it right and human intervention can unfortunately get it so wrong. Scientists have created a tiny camera that sits inside a capsule (not unlike a dietary supplement capsule), which research participants swallow, thereby providing about 16 hours of footage from inside the digestive system. The researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the US gave one group a home-made meal, where they made noodles from scratch, from flour and water, and served it in a broth made from water, salt and vegetables. The other group was given a ready-meal bought from the supermarket: noodles with 15 different ingredients on the label, along with a blue coloured drink.
After four hours, the camera footage showed that those in the real food group had only tiny, white pieces of fluff remaining in their digestive tract; the food was well broken down. For those in the bought-food group four hours after ingestion, you could still see the teeth marks in the noodles where the participants had bitten into them. There were still long strings of noodles remaining intact four hours after eating. In addition to this, the noodles had been dyed blue from the drink.
When you have "food" exposed to your digestive system's equipment for four hours, and it is still relatively intact, this suggests that this "food" may contain substances which we have no capacity to break down.
We tend not to think about foods that are more processed in terms of whether our body can break them down or not – we simply assume that because it's on the shelf it's "food" and that it must be okay for us to consume long term. The reality though is that it's only within the last 100 years that more highly processed foods have become so readily available and our bodies are relatively slow to evolve to be able to digest them.
Remember, food is the only way we obtain physical energy. So when it comes to food, choose low human intervention food. Choose real food. Wholefood. This is food after all.
There is no such thing as "junk food." There is only "junk" or there is "food". Your body has the equipment (i.e. digestive enzymes) to break food down and provide you with the nourishment your body needs to function optimally. That includes weight loss. You don't have to lose weight to be healthy – you have to be healthy to lose weight.
Written by Dr Libby Weaver. First appeared on Stuff.co.nz.