Eating right is hard, but worth it

Coach Tracey is my inspiration

The biggest worry is the “food” that has been altered. Foods with chemical enhancement or alteration are the biggest problem facing consumers concerned with healthy eating.

According the Melanie Warner author of “Pandora’s Lunch Box: How Processed Food Took Over The American Meal” 7 of 10 things we eat are laden with chemicals or include un-natural ingredients.   But these foods are engineered to provide a neurotransmission of dopamine that makes us happy. It is, in a very literal sense, a drug addiction no different than street drugs. We are given it, it makes us feel good and we seek more. The rub is that, that it is so easy to find, and cheap too.  This makes the addiction even harder to break.

The chemicals in processed food can range from the odd (like silicon dioxide, or sand, in Taco meat) to the truly scary (like sodium bisulfite, a toilet bowl cleaner found in potato chips).

What’s worse is that studies published in the Journal of American Clinical Nutrition concluded that virtually ALL chronic diseases are in part caused by our modern diet of engineered foods. Extended out we can surmise that processed food causes disease, disease causes death….therefore….

I am a junk food eater I confess. I have always thought that as long as I exercise that I would remain fairly healthy. However, the National Institute of Health shares that the body needs twice as much (literally) activity to burn the same amount of calories burned after consuming whole foods. So I now know that a Snickers may satisfy but it means burning over 500 calories just to break even.

So, good on you Tracey, you have motivated me to eat better, but it isn’t that we didn’t know these things, it’s just that doing the right thing seems to take so much effort. Wow, I wonder if that axiom applies to anything else in life.