HOME * MAILING LIST * CONTACT * ABOUT

Packaged For Your Convenience

As I learn more about health, medicine, and diet, I find myself moving away from most already-prepared foods. It isn’t as hard as I would have thought; I was already getting direct feedback from my body via a variety of complaints and mild reactions that some of the things I was eating were not doing me any good. One side-dish of packaged noodles with sauce, for example, would send me gasping for water for the rest of the night until bedtime, when I would feel waterlogged and exhausted.

The thing of it is, I didn’t realize how many prepared-packaged things had crept into my life. I grew up in a household that eschewed most pre-fab food – exceptions being made for a couple of specific Campbell’s soups and a limited repertoire of canned vegetables. My mother started on a health-food kick when she was pregnant with me, and it lasted for years. This was the 1970s, though, and while the prevailing food wisdom of the era encouraged the reading of labels, we weren’t as vigilant about certain things as I am today. Some of this is because the current batch of nastiness – things like High Fructose Corn Syrup or Glucose/Fructose, as it is listed in Canada – either weren’t invented yet, or weren’t yet appearing in every single item of processed food. Some of it is because we now know more about the effects of certain items on our digestive systems, hearts, blood, and arteries.

Health-related nutrition is as subject to fashion as it is to information or scientific discovery, it turns out. Witness the oat-bran fibre craze in the eighties, the low-fat nineties, or the cycling resurgence of Atkins and other low-carbohydrate diet frenzies. Whether the goal is losing weight, lowering cholesterol, or getting the bowel to move regularly, there are remnants of all of these once-fashionable programs in much of what makes people nervous about food today – what to eat, when, and how much. Some programs – such as Food Combining, which required strict vigilance and a lot of planning – gained notoriety for resulting in nutritional deficiencies that led to greater health-problems than they were supposed to address, not to mention making dining out virtually impossible.

Despite the existence of a few overly complicated programs such as Food Combining, most people seek a plan that allows them to make simple decisions. Eat this, don’t eat that. They don’t want to have to think, or do research, or learn what works best for them. They don’t want to know why it works, except in a few easy sentences they can drop into cocktail chatter to justify whatever they are eating or shunning, and (martyr-types notwithstanding) they don’t want to follow a program that requires them to do much work.

Certainly, no one wants to have to perform complicated calculations before eating a meal, unless they suffer from a Tesla-like obsessive-compulsive disorder. For a long time, I kept a fairly vigilant eye on my diet for fats – type and amount – striving to maximize my use of heart-healthy oils such as olive and canola, minimize the saturates, and keep the overall levels down to a reasonable level. This occasionally necessitated certain calculations in order to ascertain whether a recipe was useable as-is or would require modifications, and I came to rely on cookbooks and magazines whose recipes would break down the components of each dish.

Unfortunately for me, I also came to rely heavily upon fat-related math from the nutritional panels of prepared and packaged foods – but I was only really looking at the fat content. During my repeated convalescences from ulcerative colitis attacks and surgical complications, I wasn’t strong enough to do much cooking. I couldn’t do much eating, either, and my weight and strength have fluxuated wildly while I fought to try and stabilize my health. While sick, I mostly ate foods that didn’t require much preparation, and I consoled myself with the fact that at least I wasn’t eating terribly fatty foods. While it’s true that I was lamentably stick-thin and frail-looking at the time, and doctors and dieticians alike were telling me to eat whatever I could keep down, irrespective of its food value, I knew that cramming fatty foods into a body that was severely muscle-depleted was not an intelligent move; I was looking for quality nutrition to get my strength back.

Gradually, I recovered enough of my strength to become functional again, and return to the kitchen. My cupboards’ contents didn’t change all that much from when I was still very sick, though; I was habituated to buying low-effort foods with a dump-and-stir ability-threshold. If asked objectively whether these were good things to be eating, let alone on any sort of regular basis, I would have said, “No.” But I didn’t ask myself.

Eventually, without any significantly crippling health crisis disarming me over the last few years, I’ve become more and more aware of how my body reacts to certain foods, and it turns out that most of the prepared, packaged foods make me feel gross. So, I stopped buying them, or I would buy them only if the ingredient list was low-sodium and additive-free. This went on for quite a while, and I was happy with that, although still not entirely healthy. I still watched fat content, and had a great deal of recipes stockpiled that fit those parameters quite nicely. I was also still suffering all sorts of minor signs of ill-health, but let me tell you this: when you have been through such severe and traumatic health episodes as I have, you sort of take for granted that you’re always going to feel a little bit unwell. It took a jolt to get me thinking and learning again, and it took another jolt to realize that simply reducing pre-fab foods was insufficient to my goal of getting my health back.

More recently, I have turned my attention to how my body produces and processes insulin – a fundamental element of determining the body’s metabolism. While I am not diabetic, I immediately started researching insulin and diabetes, and learning a lot about blood glucose levels. Pieces of the puzzle started falling into place, and I learned how to better manage my nutrition.

I started with a fairly typical slash-and-burn approach to anything involving any sort of added sugar. For a few weeks, these items were strictly verboten, and I was surprised at how much hidden and added sugar I was really ingesting. During this oddly Lenten fast, I did some more research. I discovered that, in terms of blood glucose levels (which determine how much insulin your body produces), there were things far more detrimental to me than simple table sugar. Refined wheat flour, for example. I had already gone through the brands of store-bought bread and turfed any that bore the dreaded words “glucose/fructose” in their ingredients, because I am deeply suspicious of it from a health perspective. Now, I am discovering that even breads made with 100% whole wheat flour are converted to glucose very quickly in the body, prompting a large insulin surge. This is not good news for someone trying to improve metabolism, but all is not lost. In this case, there are pre-packaged convenience foods that bridge the gap that the home-baker can’t easily fill. Specifically, there are four kinds of breads that foil the body’s attempts to convert it instantly to sugar: sourdough (ideally, sourdough rye, but any sourdough will do) which has oddly acidic properties that force the body to process it more slowly, whole grain rye breads (preferably with grains showing), flourless sprouted wheat breads (made from milled sprouted grains as opposed to flour ground from dry kernels), and breads made from 100% stone-ground flour (stone-ground flour particles are coarser, and therefore digest more slowly).

I’ve run a strange gamut since starting this research, and putting it into place – along with other dietary tweaks built on the same information. I started off feeling quite reactionary, frustrated, and a little scared, and ended up taking a very strategic, if not downright pro-active approach, and feeling very encouraged. I’m certainly not eating less food, I’m just exchanging some items for better choices, or better versions of what I used to eat. I am not willing to subscribe to a culture of deprivation. There isn’t anything that I need to cut out of my life wholesale, but there are types of food that I should be relying on more or less often.

What is surprising me most is that I’m finding that there are pre-packaged foods that meet my needs, in some cases – such as the bread – offering both far more convenience and variety than I would be able to manage in my own kitchen. I’m not condemned to a culinary life of never-ending lentils and brown rice. I still believe that healthy eating involves preparing more meals “from scratch” and being aware of fat and sugar content, but it’s nice to know that you can still grab something from the store and feel good about it. Plus, it turns out that pasta is good for me!
 

March 2006