Eating real food matters. If you’re managing a chronic illness, like Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), eating real food might have even more meaning to you because of the significant impact it can have on how you manage the condition and how you feel on a day-to-day basis.
Let’s start by defining real food. I’m talking about food that is whole and minimally processed- it either grew from the ground or was a live animal. Real foods have simple ingredients that you can say and you know what they are. If a food item includes ingredients that you can’t pronounce or don’t know what they are, that means it’s likely not a real food.
The food industry is a little tricky about how they classify processed foods. They include any cleaning, cutting, cooking, canning, freezing, drying, or packaging as part of their definition for processed food. Unless you live on a farm, you are going to have to eat “processed food” by their definition, because whatever you pick up at the grocery store will at least have been packed and cleaned. The processed foods that are really concerning are those packed full of full of sugar, preservatives, flavorings, and artificial coloring, with ingredients you cannot pronounce. The goal, then, is to stick to minimally processed foods and avoid heavily processed food-like substances.
Quality over quantity
Eating real food is one of those meaningful bits of life that I’m particularly passionate about because it can make such a difference in an individual’s health, and it goes way beyond counting calories. If we just focus on the calories, then we’re only acknowledging quantity and neglecting quality. Over and over again, my life experiences continue to reinforce quality as a more influential factor across the board than quantity. We can also observe a similar trend in research. Research shows us that quality is more impactful than quantity in terms of parenting, mindfulness practices, sleep, and human relationships, to name a few areas.
Humans frequently evaluate the quality of their experiences during interaction with other humans. On one level, the quality of our interactions plays a role in how we chose partners and friends. On another level, we often refer to our interactions with others in professional settings as customer service, which is a core component of nearly every industry. It’s certainly something that people have frequently felt frustrated by during the pandemic because the quality of service has decreased.
Let’s dive in to why the quality of our food matters…
1. What we eat fuels our bodies
The quality of our food matters because it’s what we fuel our bodies with. Food is like fuel- it can power our bodies and help us sustain energy levels. Food is one of the most important ways to nourish our bodies with nutrients. The Whole30 and Paleo diets are two of the most nutrient-rich frameworks for eating that I’m aware of because they focus on eating real food, plain and simple.
Some people go into those diets focused on all of the things they can’t have. If you can shift your mindset to choosing eating foods that make your body feel most alive and energized, it doesn’t feel like a burden to avoid the foods that cause digestive discomfort, brain fog, and insidious health conditions that you won’t see until mid-life. Of course, when making a shift in how you eat, you’re likely going to feel quiet awful in the transition. Once you settle into a new way of eating, listen to your body and see how it responds to different foods so you can develop your own personalized diet that best fits you and your needs.
In terms of how food fuels our bodies, nutrients from the food we eat are absorbed by the small intestine and carried off into the bloodstream where there are dispersed to the rest of the body. Once in the bloodstream, the nutrients need to enter our cells to become energy. There are two types of nutrients: macronutrients, which include protein, carbohydrates, and fat; and micronutrients like virtamins and minerals.
To give our bodies a wide array of micronutrients, fruits and vegetables are essential. Nutritional deficiencies can lead to many unwanted health conditions, and some of them can prove to be fatal. On the flip side, ensuring adequate levels of some micronutrients can help to boost our immune systems and keep us healthy. When we eat food that has less nutrients and more fillers from significant processing, we increase the risk of having more health conditions. There are far fewer nutrients to fuel our bodies in processed food when compared to real food.
2. What we eat impacts how we feel
What we eat also impacts how we feel. Aside from the science, which we’ll dive into, I notice how sluggish I feel when I eat processed food. I find that I’m more prone to headaches, brain fog, fatigue, and irritability. This observational and experiential data about how food makes me feel is really helpful in knowing what works best for my body and brain, and it has nothing to do with what a doctor told me or what I read in a book. And unlike doctor’s visits and books, listening to your body is also free.
From a scientific perspective, nutritional psychiatrists support people in learning how what they eat can impact mental health. This article discusses how nutrient-rich diets can have a positive impact on depression, and here is some formal research to back it up. Research shows that the microbiome in our gut can be an important piece of the puzzle in how our brains process neurotransmitters, and that’s important because some neurotransmitters play a role in regulating our mood. Serotonin is one of those important neurotransmitters, and it also plays a role in regulating our pain receptors, our appetite, and sleep. A large portion of serotonin- about 95%– comes from the intestinal tract as food is digested.
The gut microbiome is made up of bacteria that protect the lining of the intestines to limit inflammation and toxins, protect against bad bacteria, and play a role in absorption of nutrients. The bacteria in the gut is also responsible for supporting direct communication between the brain and the gut.
3. What we eat impacts our genes
I recently learned about nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics. Nutrigenetics is the study of how a person’s body responds to the nutrients it receives based on their genetic make up. Nutrigenomics studies how food interacts with our genes and influences the expression of genes.
If you’ve read previous posts, you may be familiar with the term epigenetics, which is a field of study that examines how the expression of our genes can be turned on or off based on environmental factors. Basically, we can’t control what genes we’re born with, but by paying attention to the quality of the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the relationships we have, the level of exercise our bodies get, and our levels of stress, we can impact what genes get activated or deactivated.
Across both fields of study, practitioners are utilizing genomic testing to determine the best diet for a particular person, which sounds like it could be quite helpful for some people. Research in these fields has also help to discovered that variations in particular genes are connected to predispositions for obesity, birth defects, and the ability to lose weight on a particular diet. Potentially, these two fields of study could help people determine what to eat to best fit the needs of their genes and prevent disease in the present moment and for future generations to come.
4. What we eat impacts inflammation
Inflammation is your body’s defense system. Inflammatory cells are mobilized when the immune system is activated in order to heal damage or attack intruding bacteria. The system is simply brilliant, but it can get out of hand when the body is constantly sending out inflammatory responses, even when there isn’t a sickness or injury to address. Chronic inflammation is a key player in many concerning conditions like allergies, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, type 2 diabetes, and Rheumatoid arthritis.
Refined Sugar
Refined sugar in processed foods is one of the most insidious causes of chronic inflammation. Our bodies are designed to process small amounts of sugar as it enters our bloodstream throughout the day as insulin carries the sugar to our cells to energize them. Insulin continues to try to store sugar in cells even when there is an excessive amount of sugar in our bloodstream, which can lead to weight gain.
Added sugar also impacts the heart as a byproduct of overloading the liver since the liver processes sugar much like it does alcohol. In excessive quantities, sugar can lead to fatty liver disease, which increases the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Plenty of research shows that diets full of added sugar increase the risks of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.
Unsurprisingly, sugar is in most processed foods and hidden under on nutrition labels as high-fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, and lactose, to list just a handful of the more than 250 names it goes by. Several studies have demonstrated that sugar can cause inflammation in the body.
Pesticides
Pesticides used on crops also impact the quality of food. Organic crops are not pesticide-free, but there are more stringent guidelines on growing practices for organic produce. On a related note, organic meat is also generally has more nutritional value because the animals have higher quality living conditions. And guess what? The animals that are fed poorly and live in miserable conditions have more markers of inflammation and stress, which then gets consumed by our bodies.
Anti-inflammatory foods
On the other hand, eating real food supports an anti-inflammatory diet. The list of anti-inflammatory foods commonly includes fruits, vegetables, nuts, and fatty fish. This is because of the nutrient compounds in real foods that meet the needs of the body at reasonable quantities without overwhelming our system or leaving us nutrient deficient.
The little things matter
As always, none of the meaningful bits of life, like eating real food, will be a magical solution for chronic illness or good health, and that’s because a magical solution doesn’t exist. When you have the mindset that you want the one thing that will fix it all, then you will feel less empowered and able to make an impact. When you approach problems with the awareness that the little things add up and can make a big difference over time, you feel more empowered and you can reap the benefits of your small investments in your self.
To read about more meaningful bits of life that can improve your quality of life, read this post about 10 things you can do to while you’re stuck in a moldy home.
We’ve Been Misinformed: 5 Reasons Processed Food is the Norm
Toxic Mold Basics: What You Need to Know
The Economics of Toxic Mold: How Money and Mold are Intertwined
Why Nobody Wants to Call it Toxic Mold
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