Nutritious and Delicious

I'm interested in nutritious things.

Nutritious food.

Nutritious relationships.

Nutritious movement. (Check out Katy Bowman)

Something is nutritious if it contains what you need for life and growth. By its very definition, what is nutritious will change over time and depending on who you are and what you need.

Nutritious things fill you up. They help you grow and change with the world around you.

Remember food as information and communication? Nutritious things are the information you give your body that see you grow and change.

They're the delicious parts of your story.

Nutritious and delicious is a good mantra to live by.

A Most Important Relationship

“Your relationship with food—the thing that you are so desperate about, which causes you so much discomfort, that you want to change and fix right now—can lead you to the centre of your very own life when you are curious about it.

What you eat, when you eat, where you eat and how you feel when you eat are clues to guide you home to yourself.” —Geneen Roth, author of Women Food and God

What is Your Story?

The complexity of what happens when we process food isn't well understood from a health perspective.

Don't get me wrong, we know a lot of things about the process, but there's so much we don't know.

Partly, this is because food science has worked to understand how to make things appealing to you rather than to understand the health aspects. Heath is usually an afterthought. Some trait of the creation that happens to exist being highlighted because, in comparison to other features of the creation, it's a healthy thing.

Suddenly you have food marked as "high in antioxidants" and sold as healthy.

Antioxidants might be a positive choice for you. But they don't necessarily make that food healthy, or even make it a food that makes all those antioxidants available to you (remember, your body still had to process the food).

It's bloody confusing.

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The thing is, no food is inherently good or bad. Food is a story. It's a script. It's information we give our bodies. It's part of the communication we have with the world. It's meals, it's people, it's community.

When you're feeling confused about all the complexity (including that which is added by all those health claims), try to remember what story you're trying to tell.

Choose food that helps you communicate that story.

If you need help starting to tell your story, I can help you get started. Reach out to me and let's get your story told!

What is Processed Food (for you)?

Our bodies are well adapted to eating whole, minimally processed foods. Eating this sort of food helps you to thrive.

In the nutrition space, it's common to say that you should avoid processed foods. It's good advice, but it's worth putting some thought into exactly what "processed" means to you.

Processing foods makes them bad. There's a conversation to be had about what processed means.

Every time you cook at home, you're processing food. How you cook it changes how you'll be able to digest it, making different macro and micro nutrients available to you.

My favourite example of this is that simply slicing or crushing garlic causes it to release a compound called allicin that has generally beneficial properties when consumed. It's not available if you don't crush or slice the garlic and the process stops in the presence of heat.

So cut your garlic first, leave it on the chopping board for 15 minutes before you cook with it.

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Maybe the line should be that "processed" is okay if you're the one doing the processing.

But even this is a big line. When was the last time you milled your own grain to make flour? Or made your own yoghurt? Or minced the meat for your own sausages?

The more you can cook at home, the better. But don't get too hung up on avoiding processed foods - just be aware of the line is for you.