Thought of the Day 09/03/2013: The Ultimate Food Processor

Sometime between my typical 6am to 2pm shift at McDonald's yesterday, while taking drive-thru orders, getting drinks and generally cleaning up the different drink stations, my mind wandered to the concept of food processing.  I actually think it happened when I picked up a McChicken to bag a drive-thru order and felt how heavy it was; I was taken aback by the weight.  A single thought popped into my head, admittedly a bit snobbish in nature, and the light bulb illuminated.  The thought was this:

"The only processing I want my food to undergo is the natural process of bodily digestion."

When relying this to a friend later, I further realized the profoundness of this sentiment when I drew the very logical conclusion that this is how the food manufacturers have tricked us into eating an astonishing amount of calories in such small amounts of food.  They process all the food which makes it calorie rich, but it leaves our processing centers, i.e. the digestive tract, with nothing to do once it reaches our system.  Instead of breaking down the elements of the food from complex to simple, which requires digestion over long periods of time to extract all the nutrients in the form of long chains of sugars, fats and amino acids, it automatically stores the already digested forms of simple fat and sugar that the manufacturers have created for us; gee, thanks! Basically, full digestion occurs over hours such that you can burn off the food in real time, in lieu of automatically storing it first.

To drive my point home, I invite you to take place in this simple experiment: For breakfast tomorrow eat one serving of old-fashioned oats (1/2 Cup), add in 1 tablespoon of peanut butter (natural variety is preferred, of course), and a banana.  [Any combination therein is fine as well, just add some nuts (1/2 serving) and a fruit]  Eat that with one fried egg prepared using olive oil cooking spray.  Heck, you can even sweeten your oatmeal with Stevia, an all natural sweetener, if you'd like! Notice how you feel afterwards, I'm willing to guess you didn't get hungry again before lunch.  Ok, the next morning go to McDonald's and have a Bacon Egg and Cheese Biscuit, or Sausage Egg and Cheese McMuffin; whatever floats your boat.  How long did it sustain you compared to the previous day? How did your body feel lethargic, did you get the trots, or did you get hungry soon afterwards? Interestingly, my proposed meal contains a maximum of 420 calories, and a McDonald's breakfast sandwich contains around 480, not to mention the significant difference between the ratio of Fat : Carbohydrate : Protein between the two meals.  Take my word for it, the former is infinitely superior.  I know full-well that I'm being ridiculously biased here, but I sincerely want people to wake up to the fact that eating whole food makes a difference to your body.  When you eat this way, it's damn near impossible to consume more calories in a day than you burn, which of course, is the magic formula for weight gain/loss.

Take Your Pick

To that point, since my significant weight loss, I've committed to a healthy diet void of many popular processed foods but I haven't cut out processed foods altogether due to their convenience and price; two formidable factors that cause the majority of the American population to remain balls-deep in EasyMac. Even this modest shift in my eating habits has enabled me to fend off that 130 pounds for 5 years now. Recently, due to a combination of health issues, I've taken the next steps by eliminating diet sodas, caffeine and artificial sweeteners.  With this new epiphany however, I see the need to cut out the 100 calorie packs of Keebler cookies, yogurt, jello, pudding, bagels and lean cuisine meals that constitute the majority of the processed foods I still eat.  There are whole/natural alternatives of these products that I've avoided because they cost more, but I've decided that my body is worth the increase in price for the less-processed alternatives.  I say 'less-processed' because our reality is such that, unless you want to live in the woods and skin your own meals, we have to function in this society which processes all our food to some degree.  Still, the benefits have spoken for themselves in the form of migraine- and anxiety-free days, as well as better digestive health.

I'll step off my soap box now.  Look, I know it's simply not practical for the majority of Americans to do what I have done, but small changes can be made to at least make advances in the right direction; buying and preparing fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables, baking/broiling/grilling lean meats using olive oil when necessary, cooking minimally processed whole grains like Wild Rice and Whole Wheat Pasta, snacking on Almonds instead of processed carbs like Poptarts, are just some examples.

In general, I still eat some processed foods, it simply can't be completely avoided in our present day society, but here are my steadfast rules:

• No High Fructose Corn Syrup 
• No Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)
• No Artificial Sweeteners (Especially Aspartame!)
• Don't eat anything with a shelf-life older than some of my underwear (Seriously, if it can sit at room temperature longer than a month without going bad, don't eat it; feed it to an enemy.)

Aside: Here's a scary fact, the 'McChicken' filet come in different boxes than the 'Crispy Chicken' filet we use for the rest of our sandwiches; why you might ask? Simply because the McChickens are sold for a mere $1.  What this means is that the consumer is getting a whole lot more breading and chicken by-product than actual chicken when compared to their alternate that sells for at least $3.59. I haven't busted out my lab kit to prove this, but it's an extremely likely deduction given both the economics and quality history of such products.  For example, remember when McDonald's proudly advertised that their McNuggets were now made with all white chicken meat sometime in the early 2000's? It left everyone pondering the dubious question, "If it's white meat now, what the hell was it before?!"

Read anything by Michael Pollan if you're interested in educating yourself about the evils of processed foods.