foodperson.com

Did you see the one about various food-rating systems vying for dominance? The ratings are intended to help people distinguish the healthier food items from the less-healthy ones.

I don’t get it. It’s just not that hard. To help those who struggle with it, however, I offer these rating systems:

Whole-food selection method

You won’t even need to write it down, it’s so easy: Buy a variety of food items that have no added ingredients, a.k.a. whole foods. Examples: Fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, dried beans, oatmeal, eggs, olive oil, meat (grass-fed and -finished, please), poultry (pastured), fish (wild, mostly), salt, pepper, herbs, flour, sugar, butter, pasta. Isn’t that easy? Of course, you’ll probably have to cook, and you do need variety, but, voila! No artificial trans fats. Lots of vitamins, minerals and fiber. Just what you need to have a healthy diet.

Now, I don’t know that this method has been subject to a rigorous scientific study. But, then, I’m not sure the other methods have, either, and mine doesn’t require any special knowledge, equipment or shopping at certain stores. I’ll grant that you may have to hunt for grass-fed meat and pastured poultry somewhere besides your favorite supermarket. If you aren’t willing or able to do that, you at least can eat very, very little of the supermarket’s kind, which has been fed antibiotics and unnatural diets (think of them as hidden ingredients) to get fat fast.

No-TV food-selection method

This approach may be significantly more challenging that the whole-foods approach, at least on the front end. If you’re like most Americans, you probably watch a fair amount of television, and that’s a big part of the problem. Those wily manufacturers don’t spend millions of dollars on ads for nothing. So here’s how this method works:

1. Turn off the TV. That’s right, turn it off and leave it off. For weeks or months.
2. Go grocery shopping. Suddenly, all those eye-catching packages will mostly be a blur because you won’t have all the advertising to help you distinguish, even in a superficial way, the Wonderfulness Frozen Lasagna from the Fantabulous Frozen Lasagna. So, if you’re driven to buy frozen lasagna and the prices are about the same, you just might pick up the package and read the ingredients. They start out OK, with blanched lasagna (water, semolina) and tomato puree, but somewhere after the normal-sounding stuff come:

modified cornstarch, salt, dehydrated onions, sugar, modified food starch, beef flavor (salt, tapioca dextrin and modified cornstarch, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, corn maltodextrin, seasoning [including hydrolyzed beef protein (contains soy)], citric acid, arabic gum), dehydrated soy sauce (soybeans, salt, wheat), dehydrated garlic, canola oil, natural flavors, flavors, cultured whey, beef stock, caramel color.

You might think about making your own lasagna. At least that’s the idea. This method has even less scientific backing, but I think it just might work.

Ignorance is bliss?

I’m not convinced that all the confused people are particularly interested in knowing which foods are better for them than others. It’s not that hard to figure out…unless you just don’t care.