How To Watch Your Step In Health Food Stores!

A Word of caution: Like supermarkets, most health food stores are carefully arranged to parade you past shelves of frivolous junk before you get to the nutritional supplements of solid value that you seek. We are a nation of impulse buyers; don’t be deceived into thinking that Wholesome Wheat Crunchies or Pure Unrefined Honey Buns are any less harmful because you find them in the same store as the yeast and the organic meat, if you are sensitive to wheat and carbohydrates, their relative purity may make little difference.

Similarly, beware of the strawberry face-creams and other “organic” goos and cosmetics. Probably more people are allergic to strawberries than to an inexpensive unscented cold cream. Ice-creams, Granola, processed soups and other food mixes and snacks cost much more in health food stores than elsewhere. The only advantage of the health food products is that they are probably (but not always) free of chemical additives. You still should not have them.

WHAT TO BUY AT THE HEALTH FOOD STORE

Of the foods you can buy either here or at a supermarket, you should opt for organically produced nuts, seeds, nut butters, and cooking oils. The fact that these foods are naturally produced without chemicals, food coloring, heat processing, or hydroge­nation makes a difference worth paying more for.

HOW VALUABLE ARE HEALTH BOOKS?

To spare you expense and a wealth of confusing misinformation, resist crackpot health fad books on sale at most health food stores. If you want a sound basic book on nutrition for yourself (or to give to your doctor) I recommend Nutrition Against Disease and Atkin’s books are useful, though I wish he paid more attention to food and environmental allergies.

If you have reason to believe that sensitivity to food additives is causing you emotional problems, it will be important for you to find a source of pure or “organically grown” meats and vegetables. Many health food stores supply produce and frozen meat and poultry, but it does-tend to be expensive.. The best solution I know to this problem is to form or join a food cooperative. Members pool time and resources, buying food wholesale to divide among them at no mark-up.

Food co-ops report that they can save their members from forty to sixty percent on their food bills every week, which is clearly an admirable saving whether you want organic food or not. The important thing will be for you to join with members who share your attitudes toward food since they buy in bulk for everyone in the group. You cannot pick and choose the way you do in a retail store.

THE CHEAPEST POSSIBLE PURE FOODS DIET

As you know, I have observed that most people do best on a diet of meat protein. As you also know, meat is, the most expensive item in your budget and not everyone can afford to eat the diet I recommend, no matter how they stretch their budgets. Chicken, turkey, and fish are less expensive sources of high quality protein, although they provide less fat than beef, lamb, or pork, and fat is important to those who need to keep their blood sugar stable. When you eat poultry, do eat the skin, which is far Control your cholesterol with the vitamins and minerals I suggest. No food today is perfect. The vitamins and minerals (especially vitamin C) will render the impurities in meat harmless for most people. In the vegetable kingdom many foods contain some amino acids, although only soybeans contain all eight. Soybeans are excellent and inexpensive. Anyone on a limited budget should eat them frequently.

When you use vegetables as a source of protein, it’s important to learn how to combine foods so that the missing acids in one vegetable will be supplied by another in the same dish or at least at the same meal. The main foods in such a regimen are seeds, legumes (peas, beans, lentils, and the like) and grains, principally rice. Agrarian cultures throughout history have evolved peasant dishes that supply complete proteins in this way. Brown rice and beans is one such combination; Middle Eastern thane sauce, which combines chick peas and sesame seed paste, is another. Many Oriental vegetable dishes combining rice, sesame seeds, and soybean curd are also good sources of protein.

Remember the key to vegetable protein benefits is to eat the right foods at the same time. If you eat kidney beans at one meal and rice at the next, you supply your body with substantially less usable protein than if you ate exactly the same amount of each food in the same meal.

Incidentally, yeast contains a very high grade of protein. Vegetable proteins have become a source of increasing interest because of the world food crisis. Ecologically, it is far more extravagant to raise a cow on grains and fodder than to eat the grains and fodder yourself. This is called eating lower on the food chain, and if the world population keeps growing at its present rate, we may all be forced to eat this way eventually. This is a form of starvation. We were ontologically-designed to eat meat.

Some people oppose eating meat on moral grounds. They feel it is wrong to slaughter animals for feed. Some people even believe meat-eating increases their aggressive tendencies. I personally suspect that being properly nourished has more to do with the control of aggressions than anything else, but of course there are people who are allergic to meat. Perhaps their moral distaste for meat eating is a result of sensitivity to meat that does indeed make them depressed or hostile.

In any case, it would be foolish to pretend that everyone will rush out and eat steak three times a day, no matter how persuasive I am. If you don’t like it, are morally opposed to it, or can’t afford it, I might as well shout down a well. So if you want to learn more about vegetable protein read Diet for a Small Planet.

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