In my work as a personal chef, I am often surprised by the amount of processed ingredients in people’s homes.  I love my clients.  They value healthy, homemade meals, and that’s why they spend the big bucks to have me cook for them.  But unless you spend all of your time figuring out how to choose healthy ingredients, chances are you have no idea what to buy.

There is a severe disconnect between us and the food we buy; a spot where we buy ingredients without considering what they are, how they’re made, and what havoc they wreck on the body.  

Most people have some form of refined sugar, refined flour, ‘cage-free’ eggs, vegetable oil, organic or hormone free milk, processed honey and fat free products in their home.  This is how we eat in America.

We buy into the marketing of food because we don’t know the difference.

It’s unrealistic to believe you’ll never eat a piece of bread from crappy hybridized wheat, or a tortilla chip fried in rancid vegetable oil, or a piece of antibiotic feed lot beef again. 

But if you can learn to replace the not so good ingredients with healthier, and equally delicious substitutions, you’re doing two things:

Becoming healthier, and voting with your dollars.  In the age of Monsanto, unethical animal practices, and undecipherable ingredient lists, this is MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER.

Here’s a list of foods that suck.  I’ll do a blog post on each elaborating why I believe they’re not great for you.  For now, I’m listing what’s bad, and the alternatives you can use.

The bad: Industrial Seed Oils

Canola, rapeseed, corn, safflower, sunflower, soybean, cottonseed oil.  

All canola in the US is genetically modified.  Industrial seed oils are highly processed – heated, bleached, and deodorized.  They’re unstable fats and oxidize quickly.  And their ratios of omega 6 to 3 is out of whack, and too much omega 6 leads to inflammation.  

Alternatives:

Olive, Sesame, Coconut, Flax, Ghee

The bad: Modern Wheat

Wheat itself is not the devil.  The problem is that the industrialization of wheat has created a super wheat strain that our bodies can’t digest, hence the recent upsurge of gluten intolerance. Modern wheat is associated with hundreds of diseases. 

Alternatives:

Einkorn flour, which is heirloom wheat flour that has not been hybridized

The bad: Mass Factory Bred Animals

If you’ve ever seen and smelled the difference between a pastured chicken vs a feed lot chicken, you know the latter is fatty, smelly, yellow-ish and sickly looking.  The pastured chicken is lean, smells clean, is an appropriate flesh color and looks 100% different than the latter. 

Do you want to eat fattened, sickly animals that been treated with antibiotics and hormones and have had crappy lives?  If you’re eating in most restaurants and shopping at mass supermarkets, this is what you’re getting.

Labeling of meat is deceptive marketing tool.  Just because something registers as antibiotic or hormone free doesn’t mean it hasn’t been bred in a feedlot, fed horrible foods, and treated inhumanely.

Alternatives:

PASTURE raised animals  

The bad: Eggs that are not pasture raised

Ever found yourself at the grocery store trying to figure out which brand to buy, only to throw your hands up and just pick a random brand that looks good? 

The marketing of eggs is tough to weed through.

Eggs from chickens that have been bred in a feedlot and fed genetically modified corn and soy or some variation of this issue.  These are typically hidden by clever marketing tactics with buzzwords that make you believe the chicken laying these eggs are healthy.

Alternative:

Eggs from chickens that grow up on pastures, with plenty of sunshine, bugs, oyster shells and veggies are what you should be eating.  

If you’re having trouble picking, you can be sure that the ones that are $8/dozen are the right ones to buy. 

I know that price is hard to afford for some. 

But the buzz words ‘cage-free, vegetarian fed, soy free, free-range’ are all marketing that doesn’t care about the welfare of the animal or whether they eat what nature intended.

The bad: Refined Sugar

Refined sugar has been stripped of all its nutrients.  It’s a pure carbohydrate that drains and leaches the body of nutrients.  It’s hard to digest and eliminate.  I’m guessing you don’t want to give up sugar, so TRY to get the healthy kinds when you can.

Alternatives:

Try coconut palm sugar, raw honey, grade b maple syrup, or stevia 

It’s impossible to achieve 100% perfection all of the time.  But taking *one* small step in the right direction – whether it’s splurging for pasture raised eggs, or refusing to buy cheap industrial oils, the choices you make have an impact.

You’ll be making a difference in your health, in the world, and in the fight to bring back real foods.

There I was, exhausted, in pain, and at my wits end, knowing I needed to change my diet but not knowing where to start.

I’d been a chef for 10 years, I knew a lot about cooking.  But my main concern with food was whether it tasted delicious.  I didn’t care if it was healthy.

It’s hard to care when you don’t directly see how food is affecting you.  You put something in your mouth, it tastes great, but there’s no visible sign that the plate of pasta you’re eating or that chocolate chip cookie is harming you.

But at some point, your body tells you when it’s time to change.  It’s up to your whether or not you listen.

I made the choice to listen.  But I didn’t know where to start because I was confused by all of the conflicting information about nutrition.

I read everything I could on the subject.  I became obsessed with Chris Kresser, Kris Carr, Underground Wellness and Dana James.  I enrolled in the school of Integrative Nutrition in New York because I needed to get to the bottom to figure out what WAS healthy.  I wanted to know what to eat to feel normal again.

What I realized is that there is no clear-cut answer.

Nutrition is a shit show of opinions.  For every scientific study that backs up a claim that something is healthy with evidence, there’s another study that backs up the exact opposite.

It’s a fledging science.  You could spend a lifetime studying nutrition without coming to any concrete conclusion.

I became convinced that paleo was the diet that would shape me back to health.  The paleo movement is strong and its leaders and followers make convincing arguments that pastured meat and vegetables are great for you, and that grains, beans, and legumes are evil.

I ate pastured meat and vegetables for months, believing I was going to heal my body with this diet.  But with a compromised liver, my body revolted.  Meat is hard for the liver to process.  Constantly feeding my body protein that it couldn’t process made me even sicker.

Ultimately, I came to my own conclusions about what was healthy.   Every body is different.  Some people do heal through a paleo diet.  Some people heal through a vegetarian diet.

The common link is what Michael Pollen articulates so eloquently: “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.”

This is easier said than done, and the reason why I started this site.  I’ll share some of my findings of what I believe is healthy in the next blog post.

Meanwhile, I would love to hear what YOU believe is healthy.  I genuinely want to hear what you think, so place your comments in the comment box below. I’m excited to hear from you!

When I made the decision to fight to be healthy because of the epstein-barr virus, I still got up every morning feeling groggy, cranky, and not exactly happy to be alive because I felt like shit. My goal was to start feeling good again, but I didn’t know how to change.

It took almost a year of feeling miserable for me to accept that I had no choice but to change my diet.  Meanwhile, I ate pizza, burgers, drank coffee and wine every day despite the fact that it didn’t make me feel good.

At the time, I believed healthy food was boring.

I wondered how to change when I loved food so much I’d made it my life?  When as a chef, I was constantly looking for the next best thing to eat?

I wasn’t sure how to pull that off.

I started by tapering off the gluten and dairy.  I cut out sandwiches, pizza, and burgers. At first I refused to give up wine, but as my liver stopped processing it efficiently, I was forced to give in.  The same happened with coffee, but it was hard.  Some days I would wake up so groggy that I would cheat and have coffee, or get so hungry that I’d eat some toast.  But it would push my healing back weeks and I’d feel awful again.

When I started to look around, to really notice menus in restaurants, and items at the grocery store, I realized I wasn’t completely at fault. I’d eaten a nutrient deprived diet most of my life that had resulted poor immune function. I realized that healthy food options were hard to come by and that there were a lot of ‘health’ foods that weren’t actually healthy.  There was a lot of marketing and information to weed through, and I didn’t know where to start.

When you start to evaluate the world around you, it’s obvious that our culture isn’t geared towards eating foods that are good for the body.

The same motivation reward part of the brain that controls addiction is activated when we eat certain foods.  A blast of dopamine is released when we eat carbs like bread and pasta.  The same thing happens when we eat fried, salty foods, or sugary snacks.  A light goes on in the brain that makes us feel awesome.  We feel better for a minute or five.

Then the crash happens, and we want more of the foods that give us this boost.  The question is do we want to feel good in the short term, or feel better in the long term?

The answer to this is obvious, but isn’t in line with our genes that make us crave bad things.  We want to feel good now.  Who cares if we feel bad later?