Identifying the Junk

In my last post on cooking, I pointed out that swapping pre-packaged food choices for home cooked meals helped alleviate many of my health issues.  However, even after making these choices, I still found myself craving packaged food and junk food. 

Part of my transition began with a lengthy and honest assessment of food, and coming to terms with the reality that most of the foods available at the grocery store are not healthy. I didn’t begin by eliminating these foods, but simply identifying them.  

In my opinion, unhealthy foods include the foods from the following categories:

• Bakery Foods: Donuts, Turnovers, Pies, Cakes, Cookies, Breads, Muffins, Bagels
• Deli Foods: Pasta salads, Potato salads, Fried foods, Lunch meats
• Canned Foods:  Canned soups, Canned vegetables, Canned fruits, Canned processed meats
• Drinks:  Any fruit juice in a bottle, carton, or at a fountain, including the naked juices in the refrigerator section, Soda, and canned or bottled teas and drinks.
• Frozen Foods:  Any meal or food that comes pre-packaged  including Pizza, TV dinners, French fries, Tator Tots, Stir fry, Popsicles, Ice cream, Frozen yogurt
• Snack Foods:  Jello, Pudding, Cookie dough, any dough in a can, Cookies, Apple sauce, Flavored yogurts, Trail mixes, Nut mixes,Crackers, Granola and Cereal Bars, Gummy Bears, Cereal, Popcorns, Rice mixes, Protein Powders, Diet shake mixes, Gravies, Seasoning packets, Peanut butter, Jelly
• Candy: Hard candy, Candy bars, Chocolate bars, Licorice, Mints, Chocolate
• Chips: Potato chips, Barbeque chips, Pretzels, chips made from Corn.
• White Anything:  White bread, Pasta, Tortillas and Rice are substances with a high glycemic index that spike blood sugar, or in other words, break down into sugar very quickly and create an inflammatory environment low in oxygen and hospitable to yeast, especially in diabetic patients (1).
• Breads:  All breads I’ve found are problematic in a hierarchical way, with white bread being the worst, breads from subway being next, then wheat and whole grain breads with corn syrup, multi-grain, potato bread, sourdough, and then to sprouted breads at the top as being the best.  Sprouted breads like Ezekial Bread have a lower glycemic index, so they absorb like whole grains.  
• Tortillas:  I’ve found that corn tortillas are generally bad, but affect me less than bread. They are hierarchical in the way bread is, with white being the worst, then wheat, then multi-grain, and then finally those tortillas made with sprouted grains being the best.
• Pasta: Pastas are not as bad as Bread and Tortillas. White pasta is definitely the worst, wheat and multigrain being second, whole grain pasta as third, and finally buckwheat Soba Noodles being the best.

This is a lot of information to take in. That is why it is important to simply identify these foods rather than make big changes at once.  Many of these foods may be foods that you don’t eat, or you can go without, and therefore you can cross them off.  Other foods you may crave, and are therefore your nemesis.  Those will be the foods that will need to take center stage.

1)    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24012126