The REAL Food Guide: How We Ate 100 Years Ago

. We ate in-season food from our local area and we cooked the recipes our mothers or grandmothers taught us to make. We didn’t calculate the number of calories we ate, or grams of carbs or fat. We ate real food and we enjoyed it. As a society, we’re arguably better fed than we have ever been, but are we better nourished? There are many new theories that say no – we have an abundance of food but we are starving on a cellular level. I’ve spent the last 14 years totally consumed by nutritional research, trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix the problem, and I have a few theories. It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact place in history where our diet and our idea of healthy eating got off track, but if you really want to know, I’d say everything went wrong when the government started to tell us what to eat. You see, the nutritional sciences are full of inaccuracies. It’s very hard to use the current scientific method to study the effects of a diet on a population. You can’t use a placebo-controlled double-blind study (like they do with drugs), because you can’t create a placebo food. Most dietary studies are simply weak, they use a small group of people and they rely on their memory for their data. What did you eat for lunch last Wednesday? Do you remember? Now try to remember everything you ate last month and you get an idea of some of the inaccuracies found in the nutritional sciences. Health Canada and the FDA are trying their best; they really would like us to be as healthy as possible. It’s in their best interests for North Americans to be fit, healthy, and age well.

The Canadian Food Guide and the American Healthy Plate are based on the current trends in nutritional science (notice I used the word “trends”), and unfortunately a nice big splash of politics. For example, the Canadian Food Guide is designed primarily by an advisory committee of 12 people, made up of industry professionals including employees from: As a Nutritionist, I question the validity of letting industry professionals who profit from what we eat dictate how we should eat. Instead of eating whole, unprocessed food, and listening to what our body wants (our gut instinct), we now decide rationally what we should and shouldn’t eat. We’ve learned to ignore our own instincts for rationality. But our instincts are right. Well, in general. With one exception (more on that in a minute), we can trust our cravings. Craving salt? That’s because your body wants more salt – add some healthy sea salt to unprocessed food and you’ll feel less anxious and have more energy. Craving fat? Your body may be deficient in essential fats or fat-soluble vitamins. Roast some root veggies or steam some broccoli and add grass-fed butter or extra virgin olive oil and help your body absorb some additional Vitamin A or K. Craving sugar and sweets? Well, that’s the craving you can’t always trust. A sugar craving is usually due to an imbalance in your gut bacteria or a sign of a blood sugar crash. Rebalance your gut bacteria and you’ll find your sugar cravings will go down dramatically. (otherwise known as “How we ate 100 years ago”): A balanced, healthy diet doesn’t come from a chart or book, and yours won’t be the same as that of your neighbor or your partner. Your healthy diet will be a unique balance of whole, unprocessed food, including healthy fats, sea salt, and natural sugars. Eat more REAL food and enjoy every bite! .

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