Simply Real: What is Health Food?

Health food is a touchy subject. I’m sure you’ve seen or heard of, or maybe even tried the different recommendations from different doctors, nutrition “experts”, and health gurus, and wondered what exactly it all meant, and if you really had to stick to eating cardboard to be healthy.

                As I wrote this, I overheard a girl around college age telling her friends about a brand of snacks she had found, and she insisted that they were good. I heard a lot of health buzzwords: gluten-free, fat-free, sugar-free, low-carb… you get the idea. Finally, one of them chimed in, “so, basically, they’re joy free!” Seriously, as much as I agreed with this girl in this particular situation (it turns out the snack being discussed was rice cakes) this is one of the worst myths about healthy food – that it has to be boring!

Perhaps a better introduction to teaching you what health food is, is to look at what it isn’t:

Healthy food isn’t boring.

Healthy food isn’t hard to cook.

Healthy food isn’t Lucky Charms.

Healthy food isn’t hot dogs.

Healthy food isn’t quinoa.

Healthy food isn’t smoothie bowls.

This is what you might be thinking right now: “Woah, woah, woah wait Emily. You just put quinoa and hot dogs in the same list of “not healthy foods”. Your ASU degree is  totally showing.”

Now hold up.

First of all, ASU’s school of nutrition is actually a great program. But I’m not here to advertise for them. Second of all, I wanted to set a theme. Each of those points falls under a bigger idea:

Healthy food isn’t boring. Healthy food isn’t hard.

What health bloggers don’t want you to know is that health food doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t have to make a roasted butternut squash stuffed with quinoa, porcini mushrooms, and tri-colored lentils with a drizzle of cashew pesto to eat healthy. The more complicated and fancy a recipe sounds doesn’t necessarily mean it’s healthy. In fact, the healthiest food in my opinion is the simplest: steamed, baked, roasted, with some spices to make it interesting, because healthy doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice flavor. Companies like to market “health” foods according to what’s popular in the majority of “health” culture: think of the girls from earlier. Gluten-free, low-carb/paleo, fat-free; all of those are buzzwords. They sound great, but in the grand scheme of what health is, they mean very little. In future posts, we’ll look at how to use spices and different ingredients to cheaply and easily make flavorful, deceptively fancy-looking-but-simple meals.

Healthy food isn’t Lucky Charms. Healthy food isn’t hot dogs.

Long story short, this blog is called “Keeping it Real” for a reason. The “real” in the title doesn’t just refer to portraying myself in a realistic manner as opposed to the fitness model culture that is health blogging. Healthy food is real food. Sure, hot dogs are made of real meat scraps – but there’s a lot of stuff added to those meat scraps that turns it from meat to mystery meat in a tube. Healthy food is simple. It’s fresh, or just a little processed (frozen, fermented, and some canned fruits and vegetables are an example of ''good" processing).  It doesn’t come from a box on a shelf with sugar and salt and vitamins added to it because it has those things in it already.  During this series, we’ll also look at some examples of “healthy” grocery lists, and how to make eating healthy truly affordable.

Healthy food isn’t quinoa. Healthy food isn’t smoothie bowls.

Yes, both of these have their respective places in health food. I love both of them, when I can afford them, because these two items are also notoriously expensive. Who would spend $12 for a smoothie bowl when you could get a coiplr burgers for $3? It’s fad foods and expensive “alternatives” that give healthful eating a bad reputation for being unaffordable, unrealistic, and exclusive. Guess what? There’s no rule that says you have to make quinoa pilaf to be healthy. Steam some brown rice to go with your meal instead. Just because something is common and accessible doesn’t mean it’s bad for you.

What I want you to learn from this is those three main, over-arching points:

·         Health food ISN’T complicated. Health food IS simple.

·         Health food ISN’T highly processed. Health food IS fresh, or minimally processed

·         Health food ISN’T expensive. Health food IS affordable.

Keeping these three points in mind, my definition of a healthy food is one that is closest to its natural form as possible, with the highest quality in nutrition available to you.

The name and overall theme of this blog is Keeping it Real, and in our reality, not everyone has access to fresh fruits and vegetables and unprocessed food. For some, the only food they have access to is frozen, dried, or canned. If that’s you, don’t feel that it’s impossible for you to be healthy because of what is available for you. It’s wildly unfair and tragic that in the United States and many other first-world nations, people still go hungry and malnourished because of where they happen to live. I want to maintain this perspective in this series, because I want it to benefit more than just those of us who are fortunate enough to have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. We can live in an ideal world in our minds where everyone can go to the grocery store and buy the best quality food, or we can acknowledge that there is a problem with our food system and make an effort to change it. Part of my vision for this series is to begin to make that effort, starting with education.

Next week, I’ll introduce you to some basic nutrition science that explains what gives nutritional quality to foods.