Natalie: Have you ever noticed that when you watch television or read the newspaper or a magazine or look at a billboard, you are inundated with ads about food. There are campaigns and marketing campaigns out there telling you what to eat. Well, I have got news for you. They are telling you the wrong things to eat, it's a fact. These foods that they are marketing so aggressively are going to lead to weight gain, diabetes and even early death. So today in this video, I'm going to talk about what foods you should eat and what food you shouldn't eat and how to tell the difference.
First of all, I have got to tell you some crazy statistics. 7% of Americans eat McDonald's every single day. 22% of Americans eat some sort of fast food every single day. And this one really is sad, 30% of children the ages between 4 and 19 eat fast food every single day. Okay and here is another crazy statistic. 90% of people's budgets that are spent on food are spent on processed foods. So let me just break it down because all of that mumbo jumbo out there and everything that you've been hearing that's confusing and people are saying this and then someone counteracts with their saying and it just really breaks down to there is two types of food that you can eat. You can eat whole foods or you can eat processed foods.
I like to call whole foods real foods and I like to call processed foods fake foods. So we got a whole food, real food versus a fake food, processed food thing going on today. Whole foods are unrefined or unprocessed or they are just minimally processed before you consume them. Processed foods on the opposite of the spectrum, they are maximally processed, they are pumped full of tons of stuff you don't even know the name of, they are boxed, packaged, convenient, they are in the middle of your grocery stores.
The definition according to an online encyclopedia says that processed foods are foods that are transformed from clean, raw, natural foods to attractive marketable foods. Now that's according to encyclopedia. Processed foods are created to be able to market them to you and to make them more attractive. So some of the characteristics of whole foods are, they are natural, they are grown in the ground or they from an animal, you know naturally. Number two, they are inconvenient because they do require some form of preparation whether it's cutting, slicing, cooking, whatever it may be. Number three, they are very bright in color.
On the opposite of that is the processed foods. Their characteristics are, they are in a box, they are in a can, they are in a bag, they are covered in foil, they are covered in plastic, they are convenient, and they are always the same. You are guaranteed that, that package of chips is going to taste the same as the next package of chips if it's the same brand. So whole foods you know, you may get something completely different. You may buy raspberries one day and they taste sweet and succulent and they are juicy and they are fresh. Then you may buy raspberries the next day and because they have such a short shelf life, they may be moldy.
So one really easy way to distinguish the difference between real food and fake food is that the real foods spoils fast, that's the food you want to eat, that's real. If it's sitting in your pantry for five years, that's fake food and you don't want to eat that. So let's just say you go buy yourself a Twinkie and you put in your pantry and you forget about it for six months. And one day you are starving and you are scrounging in your pantry for something to eat and you see your Twinkie and you are all excited and you go look at and it looks exactly the same as it did six months ago, well, why is that? Well, because even the bacteria and microbes and yeast and mold, they don't even want to eat that crap. That food that has tons of artificial ingredients and chemicals pumped into it, it's inedible to even the microbes. So why on earth are we jamming that kind of stuff in our mouths and then expect to not have any health problems?
Now in contrast, go buy yourself an apple, cut it up, buy some fruit, open it up, set on the counter. In two days that thing is going to be disintegrated, it is going to be brown, mushy, yucky, gross. Why does that food look like that and a package food stay perfect? Well, because the microbes and the bacteria know what's healthy to eat and they are going to go for the whole food instead of the package food. So, we've got two types of food. One food, the processed food, the bacteria, you know they are not going to eat that and the other type of food, the whole food, the bacteria all about it. What you think happens to you when you eat processed food and you ingested in your digestive system which has a ton of healthy bacteria? That healthy bacteria aren't going to be so happy when you eat that processed food. On the other hand, when you eat whole foods, it's actually going to be food for the healthy bacteria, so it's going to increase your digestive health.
Now, let's just talk about a really simple way to differentiate between real foods and fake foods. When you go to the grocery store, if you look at broccoli, you can inspect that little tag that's on the broccoli and guess what? There is not an ingredient list. There is not in a list that says contains broccoli. On the other hand if you go to the freezer section and look at some mixed vegetable frozen dinner, it's going to have a long ingredient list. So anything that has an ingredient list that's longer than your arm and you don't even know how to pronounce the words and know what the words mean, chances are it's a processed food. Now if someone is shopping for whole foods, they are going to purchase a majority of their foods from Farmers' Market or throughout the grocery store, they are going to be purchasing food on the outer rim of the grocery store, that's where all your milk, your cheeses, your produces is and that's where you're going to find the whole foods, the real food.
Now the oils that are in the middle of the store, where it's room temperature, frozen, those are the foods that are processed. If you spend the majority of your time in the middle of the grocery store, you are buying the wrong types of foods. Also if your pantry is larger than your refrigerator, if you have more items in your pantry then you do have produce in your refrigerator, chances are you are also purchasing the wrong types of foods. Let's face it. As Americans, we are confused about what to eat. We are marketed campaigns and commercial to death, literally. 90% of our food budget is spent on processed foods. I firmly believe that, we are not marketed the healthiest foods because it's going to keep us living longer. We are marketed the foods that are going to keep us addicted, keep us eating more because it's going to make the food industry more money. There are things that we can do, simple things that we can do to improve our health namely choosing whole foods over processed foods. We will maintain a healthy weight, we will have the nutrients our body needs for health and we will feel better.
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