A Solid, Simple Nutrition Principle

Confused by all the conflicting advice on food and nutrition out there? Don’t be. Healthy eating is simple. Here is one rock-solid principle to remember:

As much as possible, eat foods that God created you to eat, the way He created them.

God created us to need food, and He created food to fulfill that need. He made our bodies to benefit the most from food that is in the form He created it. Man cannot make anything that God made any better.

For example, God made apples. An apple is a wonderful food. Ingredients list: apple.

If you want to make apples more of a treat, make applesauce. Just slice the apples, cook them for about eight hours, season them if you wish with cinnamon or nutmeg, puree and enjoy.

Food manufacturers, however, are more interested in profit than in your health. They will use anything they can to make their food look better, taste better, last longer, and cause you to crave more. Mott’s “Strawberry Flavored Applesauce” has these ingredients: apples, high fructose corn syrup, water, strawberry puree, natural flavor, ascorbic acid, Red 40. That is a not-so-wonderful “food” engineered to benefit Mott’s stockholders more than your body.

As much as possible, avoid processed, refined foods: refined sugar, white flour, refined vegetable oils, canned foods (unless you do your own canning), condensed milk, pasteurized milk, skim and low-fat milk, hydrogenated fats, additives and artificial sweeteners. Most of these are loaded with chemicals, preservatives, taste enhancers and colorings that God did not create for us to consume. People have created them to sell food and make money.

When you are at the store, remember: If it is in a can or a box that came out of a factory, it probably comes with problems.

Read nutrition labels. Many of them contain a long list of unpronounceable ingredients that come from chemistry laboratories, not grandma’s kitchen (even though it may say “Grandma’s Kitchen” on the front): emulsifiers, polysorbate 20, potassium propionate, azodicarbonamide enzymes, propylene glycol alginate and so on.

If you do buy something that comes in a box or a can, choose the product with the fewest ingredients—preferably six or fewer recognizable, pronounceable ingredients.

Modern food production has created a lot of allergies. Food sensitivities and allergies can wreak havoc on your system. You might be suffering from food allergies without realizing it, so you are hurting yourself every time you unknowingly eat an allergen.

This even extends to basic foods that God created but that have been processed by food factories, especially these items: milk, eggs, wheat, soy, peanuts, tree nuts (almonds, cashews, walnuts) and fish (bass, cod, flounder). If you are often unwell, try getting off all of these ingredients and see how you feel. Then add them back one at a time to see which one makes you worse.

“Eat only those natural foods that will spoil, and eat them before they do,” wrote educator Herbert W. Armstrong. If you keep this rule in mind, you will eat far less refined food and processed food loaded with preservatives. You’ll eat far more fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh meats and whole grains.

Educate your taste buds to enjoy food as God made it. Train yourself to enjoy whole food for desserts (fruit and nuts, for example) and healthier desserts—cakes and cookies with whole flours and whole sweeteners. The more you eat them instead of processed junk food, the more you will enjoy them.

When you eat whole foods, your body will assimilate nutrients better. For example, when you eat whole grain whole wheat, you are eating the bran and germ that contains almost all the vitamins, minerals and enzymes that help you digest the starchy part (the endosperm). When you eat refined wheat, your body still needs those vitamins, minerals and enzymes to digest the starchy part, but they have been removed; only the starchy part remains. This means that your body has to pull those vitamins, minerals and enzymes from your own bones, tissues and organs in order to digest it. When you eat a refined product, not only are you missing out on the wonderful nutrients God created in it, you are actually robbing your body of those nutrients!

God’s whole foods give you nutrients. Man-made counterfeits take nutrients from you. Eat whole wheat rather than refined flour, whole grain pasta, brown rice rather than white rice, whole fruits and vegetables with the skins.

Don’t let the cacophony of conflicting nutritional advice confuse you. Start simple: Eat whole foods.