What is Real Food Really?

At a youth soccer competition recently, I overheard a team coach instruct his players to be sure to eat some Real Food while on break between games. The youngsters had been competing all morning and had some time until the afternoon games.

The group I was with, gathered together and the father handed over several bills to the young athlete. He instructed her to go to the snack bar. “Get yourself a hot dog and anything else you want”, he said.

With parents, sporting parents especially, I have learned that keeping my educated mouth shut in such circumstances is often the best and only option. Being knowledgeable about sport competition and nutrition can sometimes be the last thing anyone wishes to hear when they think that a hot dog is appropriate nutrition for a competing athlete. They do however run the risk of becoming an illustration in one of my blog posts.

Different Interpretation?

While the term Real Food gets bantered about quite a bit, what the phrase describes can mean different things to different people. As with any communication, context is everything.

While the incident described above involved the physiology of the human body in athletic competition, real food may also describe eating only organically produced fruits, vegetables, and meats. The interest is in consuming foods that can provide nutrition to the body. Not all commercially available foods can do this.

Real Food Availability

When we look at food as nutrition, we need to look at whether the food has nutritional value and can our bodies access this nutrition. Industry can pump all of the vitamins and minerals into processed foods it wants to but unless our body can absorb that nutrition, it is wasted effort.

The two-dollar word for this is bio-availability. If a food cannot be used by the body, all we have done is rent it as it passed through our digestion. The processing of food changes how it is used by body, so consuming foods with less processing and more bio-availability just makes sense.

The same goes for the array of nutritional supplements on the market. Companies have managed to distill down vitamins and package them in pill form. Okay. The certified potency of the supplements (whether the advertised vitamins are present in the pills) relates only to whether the vitamins are present in the pills themselves. Can you digest and benefit from those vitamins? Not so sure.

A Healthy Response

An obvious answer to consuming bio-available foods is to keep your choices simple and unprocessed as possible.

• Whole foods will give you tremendous nutrition for the investment. While they are a better nutritional value compared to traditional whole foods, plus organic sources will reduce your exposure to toxins used in the raising of the food. They also provide terrific flavor over the processed versions.
• Eat foods with the least amount of processing possible. Read nutrition labels and learn some of what the ingredients mean. Let common sense direct your decision-making. If there are 15 unpronounceable ingredients on a package of peas, you likely have a poor nutritional choice in your hands.
• Consume things in moderation. Calorie dense foods, no matter how healthy, can be harmful when consumed to excess. Just be aware of the calories in your favorite cashews or turkey leg. Stressing on counting calories not required.
• Consume things in variety. This is probably the best part of eating healthy. We get to eat many flavorful things. Have fun! When eating more flavorful whole foods, try things you’ve not eaten before. It’s not like being forced to eat your broccoli as a kid. Explore and find out what else you like!
• Give yourself the occasional break. So much of eating is psychological, so feel free to reward yourself with some of your old diet on occasion. A Big Mac will not destroy your healthy eating habits, though it may give you indigestion enough to make you reconsider doing so in the future.

Eat well and feel good about yourself.

If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
― Michael Pollan