Diet thoughts

There is so much discussion of diet, and how it affects your health.  I have been thinking about my own diet rules, and figuring out how to distill them and make them simple, easy to follow, harder not to follow.

My first diet rule, no processed food.  Nothing that comes out of a box. No coerced oils.

One of the bits of evidence coming out now, regarding the obesity epidemic in North America, is that the sharp increase in obesity matches the increases in processed foods, and seed oils in our diet.  If we want to control our weight, and control our health, we have to remove these processed foods from our diets.  The evidence is starting to show us that they do bad things to our long-term health, and it is not justified by the low cost.

We were kinda forced to follow this rule after my wife first started having symptoms of celiacs disease.  Once you eliminate gluten from your diet, that almost removes all processed foods, as they all seem to use wheat or barley as a binding agent or coating in the foods.  After spending hours googling in the supermarket aisles, we just decided to stop buying all processed foods.   There are exceptions, of course, rules are made to be broken.  We still buy gluten-free pasta, its good every one and a while.  I guess the message here is to be aware of why you have the rule, and why it might be occasionally ok to bend it.

No coerced oils.  This means no seed oils mainly.  By coerced, i mean that they had to torture that seed to get the oil it out if.  They didn't just squeezed it, they used heat and chemicals to make the oil come out, and maybe that oil was just not meant to be eaten that way.  We don't exactly know how the chemicals and heat may have changed that oil, but we do know that these oils cause inflammation.  Think of a sunburn as inflammation, but that it's inside your blood vessels.   THat can't be be good for you.  Instead, oils that can be just pressed out are best, and olive oil is the king.here.  We also use avocado oil, and camelina oil (because it says its pressed).

I don't have any advice yet on the process to get rid of processed food from your diet, just go at it a step at a time, like almost all other health and fitness goals.