3 — A Working Definition of ‘Food’

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral podcast number three. So today I thought we should talk a bit about what is considered 'food', in our perspective. We don't really have a working definition of 'food' in our modern society. There's no clear demarcation line in the sand between what is actually real nutritious food, and the processed rubbish that you get in most supermarkets. And I think, if you want to build robust health and vitality, it's one of the most essential concepts that we could follow is to just eat real food. And so, by and large, what that means is that we eat stuff that's from the land or the ocean. It's not from the factories of Nestlé or Kellogg, for example. And this is because proper nutrition comes from animals, plants and fungi, but mainly animals, as we talked about in the previous episode, that have been cared for whilst alive, and then minimally processed, but again, properly prepared, en route to your plate. Whereas from labs and factories, we get lifeless calories that have been fortified with a sprinkling of synthetic vitamins and minerals. So real food is much more sophisticated, and of much higher quality than factory food. Let's take honey as an example here. I think it is useful to use examples that we're all familiar with. So honey is made by bees. Bees have been perfecting their recipe for honey, and the other things they make like propolis, and royal jelly and pollen for around 125 million years. So each of these foods contains hundreds of components, many of which are yet to be identified by modern science. And humans, clever though we may be simply cannot reproduce substitutes for such biologically complex foods, like honey and human breast milk, for example, in our labs, and factories. Think about the timeline on this: 125 million years is a long, long time. Kellogg's cornflakes have only been around for 100 years, if that. So while bees are over there making incredibly complex and sophisticated things like honey, which actually has profound nutritional and medicinal qualities, if we don't pasteurise it, corporations run by modern humans, are putting toxic ingredients into your food. And then, pretending that it's food in the first place, and then promoting it, and the synthetic vitamins and minerals and whatever else they added as a "healthy option" for you and your children. And they tend to take a lot of the nutrition out in the refining and processing. So they have to inject it back in, they have to fortify it. And at that point, it's not really food. It's more like a 'food-like substance' as one of my favourite authors, Michael Pollan likes to say. And I think it's the height of ignorance to think that we could create or recreate deep nutrition in factories. As you now know food made by Mother Nature is infinitely complex, and packaging up macros and adding a sprinkling of zinc or whatever, simply isn't good enough. So for our purposes here with this project, at Eat Ancestral, and for the stuff that you eat to be considered food, we think it needs to offer more than calories, synthetic vitamins and cheap mouth pleasure. The words that are written on most food packaging are also cheap. And building robust, healthy chronic-disease-free-humans requires a much deeper understanding of nutrition than what modern food packaging laws would allow for, or what corporations would have you believe. It's much more complicated than that. But, to simplify things here, all you need to know to get started, however, is that eating real food is key. It is the best disease-protecting, immune-boosting, performance-enhancing body-fat reducing diet you'll ever find It's a matter of prioritising quality over quantity. And if you understand how to prepare and cook all his real food, life will get even better for you. But that is another topic for another day. I hope you've found this useful. My name is Ben, you've been listening to the Eat Ancestral podcast. I'll see you in the next one. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai