Spring is in the air and for many of us that means spring cleaning our home and gardens. But our bodies and daily lives need attention too!

From the moment I breathed in the sweet, fresh air of my mother’s garden in England, I felt connected to nature. Funny how it all started with a garden. For many, the love of food comes from the kitchen, but for me, it all started with the growing. I spent as much time as I could in that delicious wonderland, picking raspberries, cherry tomatoes and finding new flavors to play with in the kitchen. As a child, I was enchanted by the tastes and flavors available but then things changed and that natural goodness of food seemed to get lost. When I went to the grocery store I was struck by how similar everything looked. I was greeted with miles of one type of tomato when I entered the produce section. Why weren’t the varieties, colors and flavors that I knew existed available here? This new idea of how food should appear seemed to be eclipsing that and I became impassioned to show that great tasting food starts with a single seed.

This passion inspired me to write my first book, “Gorgeously Green” and tour the country teaching others to live a joyously healthy lifestyle. It was important to find, discover and support other initiatives that were helping people connect to the foods they were eating, like the Seeds of Change Grant Program. Getting more people comfortable with growing foods and taking their meals from the seed to the plate is an exciting adventure I am thrilled to be on.

It’s simple to start that journey with my simple steps to spring clean your diet and your life.

1. Learn to appreciate “slow food” and the care and time it takes to grow just one carrot. We often take food for granted but when we grow our own, we start to realize how precious fresh, organic food really is. So, instead of store-purchased vegetables, take the time to grow your own. If you are just starting your own garden, herbs are a great way to learn to grow.
2. The most important thing is that green living is 100 percent about health. It’s not something out there somewhere, it’s as close as the products you put on your skin and the food you put in your body. Try alternating your food by swapping out well-known foods for ones that may not be as main stream but can be part of a healthy lifestyle.
   • Swap out dairy-based cheeses for almond cheese or cashew cheese. Almond cheese in particular is very nutrient dense, high in protein, calcium and healthy fats.
   • Swap out eggs for chia and flax seeds when baking. These superfoods are filled with protein, omega-3 fatty acids, fiber and an excellent source of vitamins and minerals.
   • Swap out your beef patties for portobello mushrooms in burgers and other grilling. They are high in nutrients, low in calories, a great source of fiber and are fat-free.
   • Swap out chicken for tempeh. Made from soybeans, tempeh is low in fat, high in protein, fiber and essential antioxidants.
   • Swap out butter for coconut oil when baking. Coconut oil contains essential fatty acids and antioxidants that help in the absorption of other minerals. It also has heart healthy benefits.
3. Bring Zen into your life. Disconnect from your phone and computer and connect to what is real. We are constantly connected these days by phones, computers and television that sometimes we need to turn all of these things off, disconnect from the static and truly reflect on the goodness and beauty that is around us.
4. Better the lives of those in your community. Get involved with your local community garden or start one of your own.
5. Make it a habit to look beyond the “organic” label and read the full ingredient list of every food and skin care product you purchase. Products with 70-95 percent organic ingredients may use the USDA Organic label.
6. Organic living can make you healthier and save you money if you are smart about it. Switching to a plant-based diet, especially one you grow yourself saves you a great deal financially and these savings you can invest in organic produce from a local farmer’s market or ordering a CSA farm box delivery.
7. Don’t underestimate small changes. Try a refillable water bottle in place of a one-time use plastic bottle. Refillable water bottles are environmentally friendly and are a great way to move towards sustainable living. Many people believe that bottled water is cleaner water but that is simply not true. Plastic water bottles can contain BPA which is harmful to your health while refillable bottles are BPA free.
8. Last but not least, have fun living an organic, green life. It truly is a delicious and wondrous one!

Sophie Uliano is a Certified Holistic Nutritionist and green and healthy living expert.

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ColumnIf you eat well, does it mean you’re part of the one percent?

A comment that I get a lot in response to writing about eating locally and eating seasonally is that doing so is only doable for a small percentage of people; those with money. I have been told that it must be nice to be “picky” about what I eat. I have been reminded time and time and again that those who have a finite amount of money don’t always have the luxury of choosing real food.

But do we have to be well off to eat well?

It’s a question that I am constantly asking myself, particularly in a world of the one percent and the haves and have nots.

First of all, what we eat isn’t all about income. Part of what dictates what you eat is your location. If you live in a city that has committed to hosting local markets, chances are it’s easy to buy local and seasonal produce. But that’s not everyone. According to the USDA, 23.5 million people live in food deserts.

I have the luxury of living in a place where I have a lot of choice about what I eat, and that choice is reasonably priced. Assuming that you do live in an area where you do have access to real food, then what? Is choosing real food over packaged, fast food an activity of the one percent?

As Mark Bittman once said, “The “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, ‘when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli …’ or ‘it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.’ This is just plain wrong.”

I read a column written by Tom Philpott last week that showed that those on food stamps actually make healthier choices at the grocery store than those who aren’t on food stamps. According to Philpott, “a 2015 USDA study concluded that, adjusting for demographic differences, people who take SNAP benefits don’t consume any more sugary drinks than their low-income peers who aren’t in the program.”

In other words, it’s not necessarily the bottom economic category that is eating poorly, it’s the middle one. The one that could choose differently. In fact, the middle class are the big consumers of junk food, not the poor.

There’s another issue at play as well: the percentage that Americans spend on food as a part of their overall income is actually quite small. Food made up about 6.4 percent of annual household expenditures in the U.S. in 2012. In France it’s 13.2 percent, Spain spends 14 percent, Germany spends 10.9 percent and even Canada comes in higher than Americans at 9.6 percent.

Americans literally haven’t put a value on eating well. And I don’t mean “eating well” in the five-star restaurant sense. I mean eating well as in giving your body the real food that it needs to thrive. If you owned an expensive, high performance sports car, would you skimp on gas to save cash and buy the cheap stuff? No, you fill it with the ultra performance fuel that would keep it running well.

And yet when it comes to our own bodies, the only thing that we are obligated to keep running every single day, we fuel ourselves with all the bad stuff, and expect high performance anyway.

There are people struggling to put food on the table–about one in six Americans have that problem every single day. And we should work hard to deal with that insecurity. But then there is that larger category of people that aren’t extremely well off, but still use the “eating well is expensive.”

Now certainly, a $6 cold pressed juice isn’t affordable for everyone. I can’t afford that. An apple however? A lot of people can buy an apple, and you don’t even have to deal with the problem of disposable packaging that comes with the bottled juice. The problem is that when we have come to think of “healthy foods” we think of all the trendy, branded healthy foods. But all you need to do to eat real food is go to the grocery store and go to the produce section.

You don’t have to be rich to eat real food, but you do have to be willing to make the choice to buy whole products over processed and to take the time to make them. Maybe you will spend a little extra on some products, and less on other, but overall, the investment on food is an investment in your personal health, that of the community and that of the environment’s.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: kiwithing

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ColumnDo we really know how to eat healthy, or do we just think we do?

I saw an image on Pinterest last week, a baking pan full of frozen fruit, being topped off with cake mix. Below it was this caption: “Frozen berries, dry cake mix, and 1 can of sprite. 350 for 35 min, yummy cobbler. I have done this a lot- it is so good and weight watcher friendly!” Whoever had posted it to Pinterest had also commented “I would use diet soda and what about an angel food cake mix?”

I sighed. You want a quick fruit cobbler? Whatever happened to frozen fruit topped with oats and honey? Why are we so quick to jump to products like cake mix and Sprite? And don’t even get me started on the belief that using a diet soda would be better.

I give nutrition and health a lot of thought, not just because I myself want to live a healthy lifestyle, but because I look at the escalating figures of obesity and health related issues in the U.S. and I wonder where we went wrong. And in a world where we think that we are more food conscious – simply because we watch more food television shows and read more food blogs, not because we actually take steps to eat better – I think this question is particularly important. Do we not know how to eat healthy?

We have an unhealthy relationship to food, one that is based on extremes. You’re either overweight and overindulgent, or you’re at the gym 4 hours a day, cutting yourself off from the pleasures of life. There’s rarely a happy medium.

Weight Watchers was founded in 1963, and since then it has built a global empire based on helping people to lose weight. That goal is admirable; there is nothing wrong with inspiring people to live healthier lives. Weight Watchers is one of many businesses that works in this field, and when I see things like the Pinterest comment above, it’s apparent that while there are many diet plans and books out there, we still have don’t have a solid understanding of nutrition.

A cobbler made with dry cake mix and a can of Sprite is far from “healthy,” even if it makes the cut on a diet-oriented point system, not to mention how many additives you are consuming. But that’s the problem about food, we think of eating more as a sum of individual parts than the whole. Which is how we end up in a situation where someone thinks that making something with cake mix and a can of Sprite is a smart weight choice. News flash: it isn’t.

But this isn’t to harp on Weight Watchers, they’re not the problem; our understanding of nutrition is. We don’t know how to eat healthy. We haven’t put a value on real food. We have forgotten how to keep things simple.

Living in France, I am often asked by visitors how it is that the French manage to eat all of their decadent delights yet stay so trim. The answer to that is multi-faceted, it has to do with smaller portion sizes, less time spent sitting in cars and more time walking, and being better in tune with your body to know when you are full, and when you are full, you stop. The French have mastered that one thing that in America we are slow to understand: you can eat real food and not feel guilty about it.

But there’s another component: while France abounds with supermarkets, and more and more people do their shopping in these places, the French diet is still made up of much fewer processed items than the American diet. Consider this: in a study done by U.S. and British researchers on high fructose corn syrup and the correlation to diabetes, it was found that in the U.S., the consumption of high fructose corn syrup per capita is 25 kilograms (55 pounds) per year. In France it’s less than 1 kilogram (2 pounds).

Why do Americans ingest so much high fructose corn syrup? It’s not because every American household has a gallon of it in the pantry and pours it over everything they eat. On the contrary, it’s a product that’s hidden in so many processed foods that have become staples in the average American diet. And it’s not just a problem for adults, kids are affected too. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 70 percent of toddler dinners studied contained too much salt, and most cereal bars, breakfast pastries and snacks aimed at infants and toddlers contained added sugars.

We don’t know how to eat healthy because we’re convinced that a packaged product that says is good for us actually is good for us, when it has been shown that the best diet out there isn’t a diet at all; it’s just a lifestyle based around eating real food.

In fact, it’s as if we are utterly shocked to find out that it’s not huge, decadent meals that are killing us, but instead all that snacking that we love to eat. All those quick, processed items that sneak their way into our diets without us even realizing it. In 1996, the average American consumed around 423 calories worth of snacks per day, compared to 580 calories in 2006, which accounts for 25 percent of the average Americans total calorie intake. Through snacking we have essentially added an entire additional meal’s worth of calories to our day.

If we are going to truly focus on how to eat healthy in the U.S., then we need to focus on better nutrition programs that educate people about real food.

Products won’t save your health, but real food will.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: U.S. Department of Agriculture

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Column Food should taste good, shouldn’t it? So why don’t we buy the good stuff?

Peruse your average grocery store and take a look at the fruits and vegetables. Everything is perfectly sized and colored. The apples are bright red and green, the potatoes all similarly oblong and the heads of lettuce without a trace of dirt or defect.

Bite into one of these products though and chances are they’ll be bland. The perfect example of course is your average out of season tomato versus an heirloom variety at the end of summer. Bright red and perfectly round, the out of season tomato plays a trick on your senses; look how beautiful it is, it must taste amazing. But one bite and you’re wishing you had known better.

The heirloom tomato on the other hand is always the funkiest looking of the bunch. The colors are inconsistent, and if you had to choose five tomatoes all the exact same size and shape you’d be at the market stand for quite some time. But when it comes to taste, there’s no going back.

Which raises the question: when it comes to food, when did looks start trumping taste?

Because we’re highly superficial about what we eat.

In the modern world, we have learned to control our environments. Nowadays you can live in a house that stays the exact same temperature all year round, regardless of whether it’s snowing or painfully warm out. Electricity has allowed us to extend our days, making us out of touch with the natural rhythm of light. If modernity has brought us one thing, it’s certainly consistency.

And when it comes to food, most people definitely want consistency. That’s why they end up buying the perfectly shaped, perfectly colored apple. But in the search for consistency, looks trump taste.

When I’m at the market I seek out the crooked vegetables. I seek out the bakeries whose loaves of bread don’t all look the same. I find joy in fermenting things because the outcome is always a little different. In fact, if there’s one thing that I love about food, it’s the inconsistencies. Because inconsistencies leave room for serendipity, the chance to discover a taste you maybe weren’t expecting.

A critique of the natural wine movement (a movement that supports minimal intervention in the winemaking process, use of indigenous yeasts, etc.) that I hear a lot is “they’re so unreliable,” meaning that when people buy a bottle of wine, they’re not always 100 percent sure of what they are going to get. But isn’t that the beauty of food? Food is natural, and things that are natural are inherently inconsistent. It’s thanks to those inconsistencies that you get the tastes that blow you away. The yin and yang of food so to say.

What’s “good” depends on a weather, soil, seasons and so much more. To produce the exact same product – be it apples, wine or bread – that looks and tastes exactly the same time and time again requires intervention. It requires scientific precision. It requires humans to control nature, to add preservatives, to treat with chemicals, to alter the genetic makeup. But in doing so, we lose the natural goodness that made us fall in love with the product in the first place.

We expect that food should taste good, but we don’t just want it to taste good, we want it to taste the same kind of good every single time we consume it. That choice can easily have us eating mediocre foods.

This is why food companies are so successful; they have managed to find the specific formula that makes a certain food product look and taste the same every single time. You can buy whole oats and make your own oatmeal, but the taste will depend on everything you put in it. Or you could just go ahead and buy the instant pack, premixed with sugar and dehydrated fruit. It’s not as healthy for you, nor does it taste as good, but at least you know what you’re getting.

The same goes for almost every single food out there. We choose Starbucks because they want coffee to taste exactly the same no matter where we are in the world, instead of seeing how the locals turn beans into a drink. We buy fluffy, white sandwich bread made of nutrient deficient flour because it makes a sandwich look the way it should instead of opting for a denser, healthier bread that’s a bit funny looking. We buy industrial eggs because we’re afraid of a little dirt and feather remnants.

If we are truly committed to eating well, then we have to give consistency the kick, because the reality is that good food isn’t perfect. We have to depend more on nature and less on science. We need to use whole ingredients. We have to eliminate the processed stuff.

Go natural. Take risks. Buy that funny looking vegetable.

Sure, not everything will be amazing all of the time, but chances are, when it comes to taste, it will be lightyears beyond what science put on the grocery shelf.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

The post Food Should Taste Good, So Why Do Looks Trump Quality? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnComfort food might not have the effect you think it does.

It’s fall, which means it’s the season of comfort food. While in summer months you can happily get away with a tomato and cucumber salad, there’s something about the colder months that kicks your body into “I want something fatty and carby!” mode.

Seriously, you’re craving a dish of macaroni and cheese right now, aren’t you?

But does eating certain foods really make us feel better than others?

A study was recently published in Healthy Psychology titled “The Myth of Comfort Food.” Studying a group of students and assessing their mood levels after watching different sad, scary or anxiety producing films and looking at how different foods affected those mood levels, the researchers concluded that, “although people believe that comfort foods provide them with mood benefits, comfort foods do not provide comfort beyond that of other foods (or no food).”

Which means that your plate of macaroni and cheese isn’t the reason you’re feeling better after you eat it.

“We found no justification for people to choose comfort foods when they are distressed,” the researchers conclude. “Removing an excuse for eating a high-calorie or high-fat food may help people develop and maintain healthier eating habits, and may lead them to focus on other, food-free methods of improving their mood,” concluded the researchers.

That’s an interesting conclusion given the amount of research that goes into looking at why we eat what we eat.

Is it that we crave comfort foods or is it that we’re addicted to certain things like sugar, salt and fat? There is an ongoing debate about whether we should be talking about “food addiction” or “eating addiction.”

“Sitting in the room with clients, you never hear people say, ‘Oh my god, I came home after a hard day and I was just craving broccoli and cauliflower so bad that I had a massive binge on these vegetables,'” Ashley Gearhardt, Ph.D. told the Huffington Post. “That’s part of the reason I think it’s important to recognize that not all food is problematic — it’s a certain class of foods that people seem to struggle with the most.”

But some people don’t agree. A new study holds that “eating addiction” might be better suited to describing our health problems than “food addiction.” As the researchers write, “similar to other behaviors eating can become an addiction in thus predisposed individuals under specific environmental circumstances.”

It’s important to point out that the fact that we’re even having this discussion is indicative of what kind of food culture we currently live in. Whether it’s a food addiction or an eating addiction, the fact that many of us in the Western world overeat is a new phenomena – Your great-great grandmother wasn’t debating on super-sizing her meal, now was she? She was just worried about putting enough food on the table to feed the entire family – and when we look at these studies it’s important to take all factors into account.

Look at our diets today and compare them to 100 years ago. There’s no denying that something has changed, and over the course of the last century we’ve ended up with a very unhealthy relationship to what we eat, both physically and mentally.

Food should be enjoyed. It should bring comfort, in the sense that sitting down to a good meal with friends and spending time talking, laughing and eating makes us feel good. It shouldn’t give us comfort because we come home from work stressed and gorge ourselves on chips in order to mask a more deep-rooted problem.

Any food can be comfort food, even that plate of broccoli. So let’s start rethinking why we’re eating certain foods and how they’re making us feel. We may just end up with a healthier relationship to food in general in the process.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: jing 

The post Comfort Food: Does Eating Make You Feel Good? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnAçaí berries, goji berries, maca powder… seems like everyone is superfoods obsessed these days.

Superfoods.

If you’ve walked into any health food store, coop or upscale market in the last few years, you know exactly what I am talking about. Hell, you don’t even need to have done any of the above. The marketing of superfoods is so out of control you can find them just about anywhere.

There’s actually no concrete definition of superfoods, and no regulation of the word’s use, which means it can really be slapped on just about anything. In everyday language, superfoods are foods that are especially nutrient-rich. In other words: foods that are good for you. Which is why it’s high time we dropped the word “superfoods.”

There are many foods that make the superfood roundups, but while it’s the more exotic ones that are having their fifteen minutes of fame right now. Açaí berries, goji berries, maca powder; wouldn’t your life be better if you had all of these in a breakfast bowl?

While superfoods certainly offer health benefits, it’s our obsession with the idea of superfoods that’s the root problem.

For one, whatever happened to the lovely blueberry? It packs a lot of antioxidants and touts plenty of health benefits, yet we seem seduced by the thought of goji berries instead. Might I point out that a lot of goji berries come from industrial fields in China? Not so super now, are they?

The idea of superfoods pulls us towards certain ingredients and keeps us from running down the list of conscious consumer questions we should always be asking: Where did these come from? Who grew them? How far did they travel to get to me?

There are plenty of foods growing near you, sometimes even in your back yard, that are perfect options for healthy eating. And yet without a superfoods label they’re not super sexy. Sweet potatoes? Boring. Durian? How exciting!

Would you go to the farmers market and pick up a vegetable and ask the farmer “is this a superfood?” and then not buy it if the farmer said no? No, no you would not. Although while we’re on the subject, probably everything on that farmers table could be considered a superfood. Because it’s real food. Real produce. Stuff that’s good for you. But you know that; it doesn’t need a marketing term to tell you that.

We need to reassess what we’re eating and why. Eating closer to home is good for the economy, the environment and ultimately, ourselves. Eating can give us a connection to place. It’s what grounds us in the rhythm of the seasons and the natural world. That being said, next time you’re on a river cruise on the Amazon, go ahead and stuff your face with those açaí berries.

But aren’t superfoods good for me?

Well, yes, that’s why someone deemed them superfoods in the first place. All these foods, local or exotic, have nutrients that our body needs, but it’s not because you throw goji berries and some chia seeds into your morning smoothie everyday that you’re going to be full of energy and ready to take on the world. The problem with the hype around superfoods is that it leads us to believe that single ingredients are the solution to all of our problems.

Superfoods will not save the world–they won’t even save you. What will? Eating a balanced diet. Not buying processed foods, even when they claim to have superfoods in them. Eating locally whenever possible. Not buying berries from China. Growing your own garden with plenty of leafy greens.

You don’t need superfoods. You just need real food.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: miheco

The post Açaí Berries, Goji Berries and Beyond: Can We Stop Talking About ‘Superfoods’? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

Grocery shopping as a single gal is challenging to say the least. Here’s how to shop healthy while reducing food waste.

Grocery stores are setup to cater to families and Godzilla-sized portions, so until someone opens a chain specifically for single people (somebody please, I’m begging you!), we have to be strategic and thrifty during our grocery shopping trips.

Here are just some of the ways all you single people can keep your trips economical and reduce the amount of food that ends up wasted once it hits your fridge:

1. Decide on your common staples
We all have our go-to snacks and meals we turn to when we’re busy, so make sure you always have those ingredients on hand. This helps free up cash for other food purchases.

2. Shop at home
Go through your kitchen once a week to familiarize yourself with what you have, and when it’s going to expire. This will help you incorporate what’s about to go bad into your following week’s meals.

3. Make a list (and stick to it)
When planning what to buy, plan meals with similar ingredients to avoid excess purchases, then freeze leftovers for days when you don’t feel like cooking or have to work extra hours.

4. Have a snack first
A study from Cornell University finally proved you shouldn’t go grocery shopping on an empty stomach: They had 68 adults fast for five hours, then gave some of them crackers while others continued to fast. Those who didn’t have a snack bought 19 percent more food (including higher calorie foods) than those who noshed.

5. Shop by yourself
When I’m grocery shopping with friends and family, I’m less likely to stick to my list. The second someone says, “You have to try this,” I’m hopeless and the item’s in my cart within seconds. Face. Palm.

6. Go for fresh
Stores stock their shelves with the least fresh items toward the front. Don’t be shy about going all the way to the back of the fridge for those cartons of milk!

7. Avoid precut produce
Sure, not having to cut it yourself saves time, but not only is this process more expensive, they tend to spoil almost as soon as you buy them.

8. Shop the bulk bins
You’ll save money on things like coffee, tea, beans and dried fruit when grocery shopping where the bulk bins are (plus, you only have to buy what you know you’ll use!).

9. Buy meat in bulk – on sale
Buying family packs of meat is cheaper as it is, so when it’s on sale it’s an added bonus. Section off the meat as soon as you get home into single-portion freezer bags and put them in the freezer. Speaking of which…

10. Become BFFs with your freezer
If you’re concerned something’s going to go bad before you have a chance to eat it – such as that ginormous mound of spinach you nabbed on sale – learn how to freeze produce properly and go to town!

11. Maximize freshness
My fave destination after I’m done grocery shopping is the website Still Tasty. Type in any food item and they’ll tell you the best ways to keep it fresh for as long as possible.

How do you keep food waste to a minimum when you’re grocery shopping?

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Image: Mike Schmid

The post Grocery Shopping for One: The Single Girl’s Guide to Not Overbuying appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnWhat does your daily diet consist of? It’s probably time you look at how to eat healthy and whether you’re really doing it at all.

We’re an independent focused society, which means that most often, when we make decisions, we’re mostly interested in how the outcomes affect us personally. We chose to ignore how our actions affect those around us, our community at large and the environment. But it’s 2014. Living in this insular way is only going to put us on a very short and destructive path. There are many things that need to change, but one of the easiest things to change that we have control over, and that has a lot of impact, is what we eat.

Changing what and how we eat isn’t solely about losing weight and looking good, although the diet books would like to have you believe that. Navigating a healthy relationship with food involves thinking about what makes your body feel good, but also what benefits your friends, family and neighbors, and even people on the other side of the world. It involves thinking about the health of farmers and the health of the environment.

How to eat healthy doesn’t mean buying fat-free yogurt instead of regular (in fact, don’t get me started on the fat-free thing). Eating well requires completely rethinking our relationship to food. It requires change.

Need a reason to inspire that change? Here are 11 reasons.

1. What you’re told is food and what food actually is are entirely different things.

Boxes of cereal that boast things like “High in calcium and vitamin D!” are not food. They are food products. Products made by large corporations that have no problem putting profit before health. Don’t buy them. Buy real food. The stuff that doesn’t need an ingredient label.

2. What you think of as “cheap food” isn’t cheap, it’s actually quite expensive.

Thanks to industrial agriculture, you’re not paying the true costs of most food at the checkout. If you’re in an economic situation to do so, then put your money where your mouth is and pay for the things that have all the costs accounted for.

3. Sugar is killing you.

No really, it is. In Western countries we’re consuming up to 150 pounds of refined sugar a year, and all that sugar is linked to obesity, cancer and beyond. Cut the added sugars out.

4. Average products are less nutritious than it used to be.

Things like wheat and vegetables are no longer what they used to be. We have literally bred the nutrients out. Solution? Not buying mass produced fruits and vegetables and getting back to the basics. Grow your own when you can. Buy locally produced and small-scale if possible.

5. We’re more concerned about expensive bacon than a health epidemic in pigs.

An epidemic aggravated by an industrial food system, I might add.

6. A superfood is not a wonder drug.

Foods that are packed with nutrients are a good thing. But let’s not get religious about it. You need to be eating a balanced diet all the time, and that doesn’t necessarily mean packing your breakfast with some exotic seed from the Southern hemisphere.

7. Fresh does not mean local.

“Fresh” salad doesn’t mean a damn thing when it sat in the back of a truck for three days in order to get to you. Look at how many fast food chains have embraced the word “fresh.” Don’t succumb to food marketing.

8. Also, artisan is not always artisan.

Not if it’s a chain pizza restaurant claiming its amazing artisan capabilities.

9. We cook less and less and eat faster and faster.

We Americans love speed and efficiency, but when it comes to food, that has proved to be a lethal combination. Maybe if we put more time into appreciating what we’re eating and more time preparing, we would have a better connection to it.

10. We have to petition not to have shoe rubber chemicals in our sandwich bread.

Yup, that happened. And if you think a chemical that’s also used to make shoe rubber is the only weird ingredient in processed food, you’re dreaming. The proof that our food system is broken is that we have to petition not to have this stuff in our food. Bake and cook at home. Because I am sure that you don’t keep azodicarbonamide on hand in your spice rack.

11. The only industry more profitable than agribusiness in the United States is pharmaceuticals.

Our food makes us sick and so we turn to pills to make us better. It’s a vicious cycle full of profitable possibility.

Related on EcoSalon

Why the Food World Could Do With a Little Restriction: Foodie Underground

Chipotle Labels GMOs But Should You Still Eat There?

Would You Rather… Eat Artificial Colors or Artificial Flavors?

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Joel Olives

The post 11 Reasons to Completely Change Your Diet (and How to Eat Healthy): Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnWe’ve talked a lot about the orgasm in this space before (and we surely will again), but it’s just one of many ingredients in the proverbial sexual feast. Find out how the food on your real dinner plate can affect your sexual appetites.

The four-stage model of sexual response goes like this: excitement/desire phase, plateau phase, orgasmic phase, and finally – resolution phase. But the most important spice isn’t even included in the list – libido.

Libido is complex animal, and its mysteries are not easily solved, particularly for women. Daniel Bergner posited some promising theories in his recent book What Do Women Want: Adventures In The Science of Female Desire, but the questions remain open. We can only answer them for ourselves (and have fun doing it). It’s not just about what we want, it’s about how often we want it, and why.

For the sake of this column, let’s put aside the myriad cultural and psychological complexities of women and desire. No matter who you are or what you want, there’s one fundamental we cannot ignore when it comes to libido: our physical health. We’ve all had a headache (the real kind) and thus decided to forgo a romp in the hay. But if the baseline health isn’t there, your libido can get stuck in a major funk.

We tend to think of blood flow issues as part of the male domain. We’ve all seen the cheesy couple in a Cialis commercial, dancing in their kitchen while the voice over says ,“It may only be an issue of blood flow, so see your doctor…” But guess what, ladies? Your sexual response also requires blood flow and engorgement. That’s where Nitric Oxide, a magical ingredient, comes in.

Nitric oxide is produced by the body, and it plays a huge role in both penile and clitoral response. Better known to chem nerds as NO, it also controls blood pressure, helps with heart and nerve function, fights infection, and more. In other words, it’s no slouch. (It won “molecule of the year” in 1992. Bet you didn’t know that molecules won awards, eh?)

How to Eat Your Way to a Better Orgasm

So how do you say yes to more NO? Well, it’s produced when you exercise; getting sweaty helps your body make more. So your next bikram yoga class can also be used to enhance your sex life.

But if you’re already pretty active, you can also eat your way to a better orgasm. L-arginine is an amino acid that converts to NO in your body – or, in science-speak, it’s an “oxidative precursor” to NO.

Want some L-arginine? You can find it in: almonds, chickpeas, coconut, flaxseeds, garlic, ginseng, greens, oatmeal, peanuts, root veggies, salmon, soy, sunflower seeds, tuna, walnuts, and chocolate. Some of the crossover items on this list–ginseng, soy, and chocolate– are also known to function as aphrodisiacs, so you’ll get double bang for your buck, so to speak. L-arginine is also available in supplement form – if you or your partner has a diagnosed sexual dysfunction, it might be worth looking into.

However, it’s important to note that there haven’t been any truly useful studies about arginine and sexual response in women. For men with ED, there is some evidence that it arginine works like Viagra – and it’s safer. Arginine has a lot of other benefits, too. But there are side effects, even though this is a “natural” supplement. Be particularly wary of arginine if you have herpes – it can aggravate your symptoms.

I believe that pleasure can and should be found along the way, and that it’s not always about the Big O. That said, there’s nothing wrong with priming your body for a better orgasm by eating better as well.

Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie@ecosalon.com and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.

Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality

Related on EcoSalon:

Slow Sex: Spring is for Shedding (Layers and Baggage)

The 9 Most Empowering Sex Positions for Women: Female Sexuality Remixed

Image: ky_olsen

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ColumnHow does a foodie decide what to eat and what not to eat?

It was early in the morning, NPR was on, and my mother and I were sitting at my kitchen table drinking tea. An interview came on the radio with an executive of a certain well known specialty food chain that prides itself on healthy foods. He was describing his diet, which was something along the lines of vegan paired with an acronym that described a diet with no oil, low salt and no refined foods. I looked at my mother and we both rolled our eyes.

Before you judge me for judging someone else and their dietary choices let me say this: I am very conscious about what I eat, and so is my mother. I live in one of those gluten free, often vegan, a little bit of lamb tagine here and there kind of worlds. If I’m in a French bakery you can be sure that I will order a croissant, and pronounce it correctly. It has taken a long time, but I know what works best for my body. You know what else works best for my body: not existing in a world of black and white. Celebrating living. Call it French, call it European, whatever it is, it’s about enjoying what’s in front of you, the company that you’re with and the moment that you’re in.

We cut things out, we add them in. One week it’s no white flour the next it’s salt. If we’re lucky enough to be in a place where we can think about what we eat, the routine becomes about determining what works and what doesn’t work for us. But how good are we at really doing that? Temptation sets in and we can’t help but each for that flour/butter/sugar/egg concoction while a little voice in our head tells us that we should know better.

We go on our quinoa rampages, but even that isn’t great. Moral of the story: there is no right or wrong way to eat. There is merely identifying what works well for you, both physically and emotionally, and incorporating that into your daily routine, while at the same time maintaining a certain level of social grace.

Here’s the real problem: We live in a society where mass media tells us we have to look one way and fast food chains encourage us to eat another. That leads to an ongoing battle within ourselves where we feel so guilty about indulgences that our only alternative is to turn to overly strict diets. We can’t commit to the personal responsibility of cutting out most processed grains, so we end up on the Paleo diet. We can’t resist the temptation of a buttery baked good so we nix out any trace of dairy in what we eat. We’re not able to turn down a second glass of wine so we go on a booze-free cleanse. Do we live with dietary restrictions, or do we restrict our diet because we simply can’t trust ourselves to eat well? In a world that we know isn’t black and white, there’s a balance to be had somewhere in the middle, somewhere that allows us to live well and eat in moderation.

There are people with real food allergies; the kind of thing that they will die or get severely ill from. Then there are the rest of us. If a certain food makes you break out in hives, don’t eat it. But if you manage to find a balance where most of the time you eat well, don’t get down on yourself because of a moment of indulgence. We all have them and we all need them. Appreciation is as much a part of good food as preparation is.

Looking through a vintage cookbook from the 1950s, I was thinking about how much butter and sugar there was, and how many variations of cookie could be had in one book. But this was back when society wasn’t facing an obesity epidemic, people ate real and not processed foods, and if you made a batch of cookies, you ate one. Not seven. There’s a lesson to be learned somewhere in those pages.

Yes, we should all eat more kale, reduce our intake of meat and stick to whole grains, but our focus on specific ingredients or beneficial elements – hey! it’s packed with omega 3 AND antioxidants! – detracts from our understanding of real food. Diets let us oversimplify, reducing what we eat to individuals elements that all put together, don’t paint the full picture of who we’re eating with, where our food came from, its effect on the planet and a whole other laundry list of items. Eating is just as much about emotion as it is about physique.

Food is supposed to give us pleasure, and while a variety of different diets certainly provide a lot of pleasure, guilt is just as much a part of the problem as individual ingredients. Know what your body needs and eat it. Eat food with friends. Indulge on occasion. Remember that eating is a multidimensional process; celebrate it.

You know what Julie Child says? “Everything in moderation… including moderation.” I couldn’t agree more.

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

The post Foodie Underground: Everything in Moderation appeared first on EcoSalon.