Social media has given an amplified voice to an increasing number of healthy food advocates. There is growing pressure on food manufacturers to provide more natural, less additive laden products. The local food movement has made farmers markets the hip place to be seen and garden to table restaurants are all the rage. One of the problems with this movement is that it tends to over complicated the issue. My advice to people is to eat more “whole” food products. This simply means that the healthiest foods are foods that are as close to how they appear in nature as possible. A simple example would be a whole fish vs frozen fish sticks. Which do you think is healthier? Of course you need to know how to handle fresh fish and you need to have the time to prepare it properly. I think this is one of the biggest obstacles to eating healthier; convenience. Most people are too busy to cook. We love to watch cooking shows and competitions but the idea of handling a raw chicken is somewhat abhorrent to many. It’s easy to buy an organic tomato at the farmers market but not so much handling raw meat and seafood. One of the books I was most influenced by in the 1980’s was American Wholefoods Cuisine by Nikki and David Goldbeck. Thirty years ahead of their time, the Goldbecks advocated a diet “low in sodium, refined sugars, refined starches as well as substances that have no natural counterpart (food additives)”. They explained that you find most whole foods on the perimeter of your grocery store and how the more packaging a product has the less natural it was likely to be. This was all good, somewhat radical advice and was easy to remember…minimal packaging, minimal ingredients, looks like it does in nature, perimeter of the grocery store. American Wholefoods Cuisine is still available if you want to check it out. Read more of this post