Last week he told us to give up wheat. Thought giving up pizza, bread and pasta would be enough? You thought wrong. Here John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime Of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, tells us why processed food is the next target on his hit list.
Ok so it’s part two of my series of blogs about how to use your kitchen to change your life for the better. Last week I talked about removing wheat from your diet. You thought that was crazy? Ha! Then you’ll think I’ve gone certifiably bonkers this week. Why? Because I’m going to tell you to do something that almost nobody does, not even the mad people who don’t eat wheat. I’m going to say it. Are you ready? Stout trousers on? Good.
Stop eating processed food.
And yes that means pizza AND chocolate Hobnobs.
Stop crying.
I firmly believe you should only eat food you have made yourself, from ingredients you have bought or grown yourself. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Well, yes, it is. Very easy. I’ve not eaten any processed food for nearly 2 years now. Nothing weird happens except that you take back control of your life and your health and feel bloody great.
You might think you know what processed food is. The back-of-the-cooker sweepings that are Pot Noodle are an obvious one as are tubes of Cheese Whizz, Vesta Chow Mein or Iceland’s Lemon Crunch Freezer cakes.
In actual fact the majority of food in your supermarket is processed food; from the biscuits and cakes to the packets of sandwiches, to the pasta sauces, to the miles of aisles of crisps. It’s all made in a factory on a bleak industrial estate somewhere you don’t want to go to, by a lot of expensive machinery or a low-paid worker in a hair net.
Why does this matter though? You want what you want when you want it and it’s the 21st century cream dream to give it to you. The big Capitalist grindcore machine is set up to hose us down with whatever our consumerist lust demands. To stop eating processed food is to fight back against the machine.
So think of it like this. You wouldn’t hand over control of your life to complete strangers in any other walk of life would you? You wouldn’t give the keys of your flat to a stranger and ask them to nip round and clean up or fix the wonky table leg.
But this is exactly what we do when we buy processed food. We have surrendered power and responsibility of our personal nutrition to the manufacturer. They now control what feeds us.
We can choose not to buy one brand over another but ultimately you have to buy something and are thus enslaved to the choices that suit their profit margin, not your health and well being.
Look at your labels; do you know what modified starch is? Do you know what it’s doing to you? Do you have any idea why yeast extract is in your can of soup or ‘spice extract’?
No of course you don’t.
I know I didn’t.
For 26 years I ate those frickin’ vegeburgers that come in green boxes (green because they’re soooooo natural and oooh look there’s a picture of a field on it too) which are loaded with pretty much all that is unholy in the processed food industry and yet because they were made from soya, I thought they were all fluffy and natural. I was a bloody fool. But this is how we are sold processed food; as natural, wholesome; low in all the bad stuff, high in all the good stuff. It is all bollocks, of course. It’s not natural at all. It’s made in a factory at very low cost and sold for large profits. Food processors don’t want you buying ingredients and making your own food; that’s what we used to do in the bad old days when almost no one was fat or died of degenerative disease. We can’t go back to those dark days now can we?
Food producers spend a fortune on marketing to convince us that their tin of contrived gloop is as natural as what granny used to make and not hosed out of some tubing in a big metal shed.
Most processed food is flavoured – these days with ‘natural flavourings’. Phew, what a relief, eh? Sadly, they don’t have to tell you what ‘natural flavourings’ really are. This is protected info. In reality it is usually some form of glutamic acid which we know more commonly as MSG. Except it’s not added as MSG because if it was you’d have to put that on the label by law. MSG got flagged as an ‘it’ll give you a headache’ additive years ago. But MSG makes bland cruddy crap taste delicious. So if you’re a food producer making bland crud at low cost you still need something to make it taste edible but you don’t want the public to think your can is a toxic waste dump. This is where natural flavourings come in. Yeast extract is one such natural flavouring and it performs the same task as MSG, as do other additives, like hydrolyzed vegetable protein. Mmm nothing says tasty dinner like hydrolyzed vegetable protein does it? It’s natural. Of course it is. It’s highly industrialised but it comes from a natural source; then again, so does dog shit.
It is such ingredients in processed food that freak our brains out and mess with how we feel. Think it doesn’t? Look at how kids raised on fast food and its home-bought equivalents. They are well documented to go, what I think child psychologists called, freakin’ mental dude. Many ascribe such modern disorders as ADHD and even autism to a diet loaded with these mind-bending ingredients along with sugar, high fructose corn-syrup (which is so pernicious a thing that it seems to have made America obese all by itself) and artificial sweeteners such as aspartame.
In The Meat Fix I talk in detail about what artificial sweeteners do to your brain. It is scary and everyone is loaded on them all the time because everyone drinks pop laced with them.
But the problems of eating processed food don’t stop there. Do you know what kind of fat is in the food you eat? It’s not all the same. You want to eat natural animal fats or olive oil – everything else is made in a massive factory and is little more than industrially extracted oils which will make you slowly but surely ill.
The Meat Fix documents how they make that wholefood store staple, Soya Oil. Dude, it’s nasty. Even if it’s sold to you in a health food store by a girl in dungarees with dreadlocks, it is sooooo not wholesome, or at least no more wholesome than sump oil.
Ok so you’re eating stuff that will fry your brain and make you fat and ill but I know what you’re thinking, I don’t have the time to start cooking when I get in from work; processed food, pizza, pies and all that, it makes my busy life easier.
No it doesn’t.
You think it does. I know, I thought it did too. But I was an idiot.
Lunch today for me was a sirloin steak and some asparagus; time to cook – 3 minutes in total. There are very few pre-prepared meals that are quicker to prepare than that. You’ll stand by the microwave for far longer to defrost some plastic tray of heinous effluent. And even if it took two minutes longer, you are not really THAT busy are you? Get up two minutes earlier if so.
What we usually mean when we say we’re too busy is that we can’t be arsed because we’re knackered. I know. That was me. But if we eat like crap, we are going to be more tired more often and that’s how you get into a spiral of negativity; always doing the wrong thing because you’re too busy doing the wrong thing.
Break the cycle. Take control back.
Cooking meals from fresh ingredients is easy. A fillet of fish takes seconds to cook, an egg a few minutes to boil, cut a piece of goats cheese and eat it with a pear – bloody lovely, takes no time at all. Stick a chicken leg in your oven for 20 minutes. Have cold roasted meat on hand for a quick salad. Man, it’s really not hard.
In exchange for a bit of forethought and effort you get to eat a diet which will feed your right and allow you to do more stuff more often and enjoy life more than you thought possible.
Eat rubbish that merely feeds the food processors profit margins but not your body and you’ll never get the best out of life. And frankly, you deserve better than that don’t you? No? Ok, carry on. Nothing to see here.