Changing Your Diet

Change your diet

If you are looking out for your health and want to start eating more fresh food or if you are a restaurant owner and want to move from your larger food distributors to local farms and move to a “farm to table” type of restaurant, then we can hopefully provide you with some resources and some questions you should consider before making any big changes.  Finding the right place to buy produce can be a difficult process.  Your business or more importantly, your health, is affected every time you put something into your body (personally) or you serve to one of your customers (if you own a restaurant).

Cutting Down Carbohydrates

In America, huge portions of our total caloric intake is weighted towards carbohydrates (and sugars which break down into carbohydrates).  For people that think they are eating healthy but aren’t seeing the results they want the two main culprits seem to be bread and pasta.  Many people don’t realize how quickly their caloric intake skyrockets when you eat bread or pasta.  Many pasta dishes are very calorie heavy and people think they are eating healthy and within their calorie limits, but very quickly balloon up the total calorie numbers.

Don’t Drink Your Calories

Soda

The biggest factor in cutting down your sugar intake and calorie intake is eliminating the drinking of calories either through soda (or other sweet drinks) or alcohol (most notably beer).  Beer, along with being very calorie heavy, also is broken down differently in your body as alcohol breaks down differently than typical carbohydrates.  Many people have stories where the only major change they made to their diet was the reduction in consumption of beer and/or soda.  Increased soda intake over the years has lead to the huge spike in obesity numbers.

The Truth of Fats

Hamburger and fries

All through the 1980’s and through the current time there has been a massive war on fat.  This saw huge swaths of foods change how they are made and the ingredients used so that they can be “fat free” or “low fat”, all while ignoring that replacing fat with sugar is not a valid way to increase the healthiness of the food we are eating.  All fat has taken the blame for the worst type of fats.

Trans Fat

This is the worst of the worst.  Trans fat is created as a byproduct of a process used to prevent healthy oils from becoming rancid by turning them into solids.  There are no positive health effects from ingesting trans fat and no level of consumption of trans fats is safe.  For those reasons the United States has banned the use of trans fats.  These fats are directly related to increased risk of diabetes and heart disease.  These fats, which carry huge health risks, are probably to blame for the anti-fat movement in the United States which saw more processed sugars enter our diets in place of fat in order to keep the taste as close as possible to the original full of fat product that consumers had grown to enjoy.

 

Sherry also writes for Write.as, HubPages, and Credit Glory (learn to improve your credit score, today!)