Eat Healing Foods for Eating Well

Although nutrition has become a science, you don’t need a Ph.D. to know how to eat well. Ignore the ads on television urging you to buy processed food, designer beverages, or dietary supplements. None of them can replace a whole-foods diet, which both heals and promotes longevity. In this book, the simple, time-honored recipes show you how whole foods are also medicine.

What do we mean by “whole foods”? They’re the things your great-grandparents recognized as food—fruits, vegetables, whole (unrefined) grains, nuts, seeds, meat, poultry, and seafood. Before the rise of the multibillion-dollar food industry, people instinctively ate food that provided all the needed nutrients. You could even trust toddlers to self-select a balanced diet. That was before the advent of processed foods.

Highly processed foods—edible items high in refined grains, added sugars and salt, and fat—pervert appetite. We’re hardwired to seek out sweet, high-calorie foods. That predisposition once helped our species survive. However, the widespread availability of foods that were once rare treats has led us, as the English proverb goes, to dig our own graves with our teeth.

Fast-food restaurants have ramped up our already busy lives. No time to cook? No problem. Just drive through and pick up a bag of greasy, inexpensive, high-calorie food. No time to sit at a dining room table? Gobble the burger and fries in your car, drop crumbles into your computer keyboard, or hunker down before the television and strap on a nosebag. Meantime, obesity rates have soared, along with its attendant chronic illnesses, such as heart disease and diabetes.

Recently, activists have taken a stand against what investigative journalist Eric Schlosser calls our “fast food nation.” Take Slow Food, an international organization that raises consciousness about the personal and global impact of food choices, champions local food traditions, promotes sustainable agriculture, and advocates taking time to prepare and enjoy, ideally with friends, food that’s both wholesome and aesthetically pleasing. Farmers’ markets have made a comeback. Consumers increasingly support small, organic farmers, even though their food may cost more than the factory-produced fare at supermarkets. (Pay a little more now and you may pay less on future medical bills.)

Eating well is simple. Author Michael Pollan sums it up beautifully in his best-selling In Defense of Food, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” When he says “food,” he means real, whole food, not what he calls “edible, food-like substances.” If you stand by that mantra, you have a firm foundation for flourishing. Indeed, research indicates that plant-based diets, such as the traditional Mediterranean and Asian diets, decrease the risk of the chronic conditions so common in America today—obesity, heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, arthritis, and possibly Alzheimer’s disease.