Processed Food Free CLUB! part 1

Cheese and the very occasional (like once a week) piece of dark chocolate are the only processed foods I have too. I make pretty much everything myself (though I do occasionally buy quorn for the children).

I eat PFF, with the only exceptions being store-bought greek yogurt, condiments, and pasta (I would love to make myself but I work 60-80 hour weeks and just can't find the time). I make a concerted effort to buy local (easy in Washington), and I make my own chicken broth, etc to avoid all the nasty things they put in the processed junk.

I'm so glad I found this group! So often I read posts by individuals "eating healthy" and their recommendations are repulsive to me, they are basically just manufactured products that have been pumped with preservatives, removed of their nutrients, and sprinkled with vitamin mixtures in order to substantiate all of their health claims (the most basic of which is that it's even "food"). Laughing Cow is not cheese, deli meat is not healthy, and store-bought bread has an ingredient list 27 products long. I'm glad I've found a group of people who would also rather eat a Macbook than a Big Mac!

Thanks for answering my question. I will look into buying the book as it is sparking my interest. I must admit I am bread and pasta addict - and I want to rid myself of this addiction or craving -- whatever you want to call it. Before starting my diet I was eating mostly carbs white and whole grains. But after starting my diet and focusing on eating more proteins I not only feel fuller, have craving less but my skin/hair is looking better. I have more energy and my mood is better too!

What would you advise for person a beginner to this type of eating ... how to start off? I don't think I could go it cold turkey since I fear I could get crazy and binge! Also I am married with 3 children ... wanting them to also eat healthy ... hoping like me ... slowly introduce this ... thanks alot!

Hi!
I love breads but actually hadn't eaten bread or pasta much since the late 90s when there was all this talk about low-carb. I didn't go full-on crazy eating unhealthy, like Atkins, but I stopped eating rice, pasta, breads, etc as a daily part of the diet and it actually wasn't so bad. I tend to substitute baby spinach or other greens for pasta in a lot of dinners. And am not much of a sandwich person either so bread wasn't hard to kick (unless I was out of dinner and in front a a warm baguette) Funny since starting MFP, I have added them back in gradually because I realized in moderation, whole grains are good.

Anyway, to get started trying to eat healthier and less processed, I don't think it's realistic to make everything but I would use Michael Pollan's advice--when you have to purchase something, make sure it has few ingredients and all ones you can recognize. Actually, you might want to read his "Food Rules", it's a little book. Not rocket-science but a good little handbook on eating well and being a good food consumer. I try not to purchase anything I can make easily--for example, pancake mix or cake mix, why? All the ingredients are in the house already. Anything w/HFCS....don't buy it and purge the house of it. Frozen prepared foods--do not buy--pull out a cookbook or google a few recipes and learn to make something new. The amount of ingredients and sodium in these foods are outrageous. Try to buy local when you can--we do beef and lamb seasonally but are still looking for a good local source for chicken. I think taking it a few steps at a time is realistic and once you master a few things, you can go on to other ones. Some things you just may want to keep buying prepared--for example, convenience foods to grab and go, like crackers and granola bars. With kids, you kind of need a few of these around. I have learned to make some crackers, like lavash crackers and Parmesan crisps and they are awesome and I know I can do it, but honestly I'd rather spend my time elsewhere so I make sure to purchase healthy high quality ones with just a few all natural ingredients. But I make homemade bread and granola myself. I love local cheeses and greek yogurt--I think the cheesemakers and yogurt producers do a good job so I just continue to be a consumer of those products---I may consider learning how to make it in the future, probably not to replace, but just to learn and see if I can do it. . Anyway, just my 2 cents.....

great discussion! so glad to have this thread!

Great advice Robin ... since seeing Micheal Pollan on Oprah of all places, I bought on of his books ... learned alot, actually which sparked my interest in eating cleaner real unprocessed foods.

Me too! Loving this thread!

I think I am a candidate for this club. I buy some processed foods, like Greek yogurt, tomato paste, multi-grain locally made bread and the occasional pasta sauce (organic, locally made), corn tortillas (my husband is Mexican) but otherwise, I am processed free. I make everything else from scratch. We only buy organic, and we try to buy local. Our eggs come from a local farm, as does all the meat we buy (which isn't much). No HFCS. And no sugar either! My teenage daughter has a rougher time at it, so I buy her cereal and the occasional organic snack. We have NO JUNK FOOD at all and I am generally appalled at what I see most people eating and when I look into the shopping carts when I'm at the regular supermarket (which is not very often). No wonder we have health and obesity problems!

Just curious what folks do for condiments? We don't buy ketchup or mustard. For salad dressing we use olive oil and balsamic vinegar. We hardly ever use mayo, but when we do I make it myself. No barbecue sauce or any other sauce for that matter. The exception is for home-made Chinese food we buy oyster sauce and hoisin sauce, and for Thai food we buy fish sauce. Oh, and we buy soy sauce. (I'm part Asian, so we do a lot of Asian cooking.) We make our own salsa (my Mexican husband taught me - yummy yum.)

I use tomato paste too store bought no salt added ... so I guess that's processed too LOL ... condiments I use locally made Dijon mustard. I make my own BBQ sauce, mayo (using milk) also Lebanese garlic aioli called Thoum. I use mostly flavoured oils and vinegars thou.

I bought bulk raw peanuts. Roast them in the oven. Once slightly brown and you smell them - they are done! Process in the robo until fine ... add TBS or so of oil then it should be PB! cheap natural and delish!

Friend of mine tried this recipe: http://simplegoodandtasty.com/2009/08/09/homemade-mustard-recipe

good morning. I don't do supplements at all either--do not believe in them. super-healthy so far...so hopefully it'll stay that way!

Just thought of funnygirl when I read this yesterday, and based on your discussion thought I'll post (link and text below) .....from the NY times dated today about how Mediterranean people are actually trying to eat like Westerners. Who would have thought????

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03YouRHere-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=what medetteranian diet&st=cse


Does the Mediterranean Diet Even Exist?

Every Saturday, a fleet of cars and trucks pulls into a windswept parking lot just off the Mediterranean. Under flapping white awnings, women slit open eggplants the size of a large man’s thumb and stuff them with a mix of chopped garlic, red peppers and walnuts. This is Souk el Tayeb, the farmers’ market that has helped make Beirut a hot destination for globe-trotting foodies. But if you want to see how the new generation of Lebanese really wants to eat, you have to go somewhere else. You have to go to Roadster Diner.

Roadster is a chain of 1950s-Americana restaurants. Its original motto, “There goes my heart,” evokes both Elvis and his artery-clogging diet. The Roadster in my Beirut neighborhood had a life-size statue of a grinning black man with huge white teeth singing into a microphone. Unlike the strenuously authentic Lebanese restaurants beloved by tourists and visiting food writers, Roadster’s nine retail franchises across Lebanon are always packed with locals.

In Europe and the United States, the so-called Mediterranean diet — rich in olive oil, whole grains, fish, fruits and vegetables and wine — is a multibillion-dollar global brand, encompassing everything from hummus to package trips to Italy, where “enogastronomic tourism” rakes in as much as five billion euros a year. Studies at Harvard and elsewhere correlate the Mediterranean diet with lower rates of heart disease, diabetes and depression. In America, health gurus like Mehmet Oz exhort followers to “eat like a Greek.” But according to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Mediterranean people have some of the worst diets in Europe, and the Greeks are the fattest: about 75 percent of the Greek population is overweight. So if the Mediterranean diet is not what people in the Mediterranean eat, then what is it?

Before there was a Mediterranean diet, there was WWII and the food shortages that went along with it. When the fighting was over, Haqvin Mamrol, a researcher in Sweden, showed that mortality from coronary disease declined in Northern European countries during the war. This was, he believed, the result of wartime restrictions on milk, butter, eggs and meat. At about the same time, a Minnesota scientist named Ancel Keys, who had been studying the effects of starvation on a group of volunteer subjects, moved on to study the diets of Midwestern businessmen. He found that these well-fed Americans were more prone to heart disease than were men in war-deprived Northern Europe. Keys postulated that saturated fats led to high levels of cholesterol and from there to cardiovascular disease. To prove it, he initiated a long-term study in seven countries, including Italy and Greece. He concluded that we should cut down drastically on saturated fat and turn to vegetable oils instead. Keys and his wife wrote two best sellers that changed the way Americans ate.

The Mediterranean diet was always a composite. Spaniards love pork; Egyptians, as a rule, do not. In some regions, people made pesto with lard, not olive oil. “There is no such thing called the Mediterranean diet; there are Mediterranean diets,” says Rami Zurayk, an agriculture professor at the American University in Beirut. “They share some commonalities — there is a lot of fruits and vegetables, there is a lot of fresh produce in them, they are eaten in small dishes, there is less meat in them. These are common characteristics, but there are many different Mediterranean diets.”

The healthy versions of these diets do have one other thing in common: they are what the Italians called “cucina povera,” the “food of the poor.” In Ancel Keys’s day, Mediterraneans ate lentils instead of meat because they had no choice. “A lot of it is to do with poverty, not geography,” says Sami Zubaida, a leading scholar on food and culture.

Diet is mostly about desire. The diet that Keys and his colleagues invented bore little resemblance to what Mediterraneans actually wanted to eat. “I’m not sure whether the prestige of such a diet would be high enough for many of the people in the Mediterranean to follow it,” says Josef Schmidhuber, a senior economist at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. “Because they aspire to a Western diet, which they conflate with prestige and wealth.”

Last year, Unesco added the Mediterranean diet to its list of the world’s great intangible cultural treasures in need of safeguarding. Today, more than half the populations of Italy, Portugal and Spain are overweight. In Eastern Mediterranean countries like Lebanon, obesity is growing — especially among the young, an increasing number of whom are happy to trade their eggplants for French fries and milkshakes at Roadster.

Annia Ciezadlo is the author of Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 3, 2011, on page MM21 of the Sunday Magazine.

There really is no really natural bread. I suppose whole grain breads are better than white bread, but it still is basically empty carbs and compared to the calories it costs you it is not very nutritional... Grains are your enemy. The agricultural reveloution brought about the decline of health in the world. It sucks because I love bread and pasta, but there are facts out there to show they are very very bad guys. Some believe even carcinagenic. Who knows, people think im crazy anyways LOL WOOHOO!!! :-D

Paul

I disagree, you can get very wholesome whole grain bread or make your own. Not all grains are evil. I eat almost exclusively French Meadow Bakery 100% organic sour dough rye bread. Ingredients: Organic Rye Flour, Spring Water, Sourdough Culture (organic Rye Flour, Spring Water), Salt.

The trouble is most people don't read their labels, most breads are horrendously processed with a 5 inch list of ingredients. I've found the best for you breads in the grocery store are in the freezer section. You have to go looking for them.

good luck and happy eating
JoJo

Thank you for all of the wonderful ideas and recipes! So happy to have found a group that eats what I consider to be natural and healthy, unlike most other posts I read on here. New to this site but please let me know if you have an "open log" and I can read what you eat. Thanks!