I spend inordinate amounts of time writing and talking to patients about what constitutes a healthy diet. This is because diet has the greatest day-to-day impact on our health, far more than I can offer with a Chiropractic adjustment. Every bite you take is like a mouth full of either medicine or poison. There is nothing any treatment or doctor or healer can do to or for you that can overcome a bad diet. So what you put in your mouth is ground zero for either building or destroying your health.
Yet, with how important diet is, the most common response I get from patients is, “That is great, but I don’t cook.” This just stops me in my tracks. I don’t know what to do with that answer. I might ask “So what do you eat?” The answer I usually get is “I mostly eat take-out.” If there existed take-out that was healthy then that would be fine. With a concentrated effort, I can usually find something worth eating on most menus. What that usually means for me is the Caesar salad with broiled chicken breast on it. The salad dressing will be full of toxic oils and the chicken will have been raised on grains filling it with inflammation-producing linoleic acid. But this is usually the least toxic food I can find on most restaurant menus. If I am up for it, a nice medium-rare steak or some prime rib would be a better choice. But with it inevitably comes the French fries – death in a basket. Or I can opt for the broccoli, full of oxalic acid and a host of other plant defense toxins.
The obvious bad choices are anything breaded. All wheat and flour products punch holes in the gut linings of every person allowing inflammatory bacterial products called LPS to leak into the body triggering immune reactions. Sorry, no one is immune. You may not feel the reaction, but it is happening anyway. So that means any bread products are a bad choice – buns on that burger, biscuits, rolls, pastries, cookies, cakes, brownies, basically, most anything dessert-like is off the menu. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. Take that flour, roll your food of choice in it and dunk it in a vat of boiling vegetable oil, and the taste skyrockets right along with the toxicity. How many take-out foods fall into this category?
Okay, so you know all that stuff is bad for you and you are a conscientious food shopper. You might choose lighter fare – salads, seafood, veggies, even green smoothies. You have to do a fair bit of checking around to find such food in a take-out world, but I believe it does exist. But again, these foods don’t really taste all that good without some sort of dressing or dip or fancy sauce on them. In the restaurant world, that means vegetable oil. Vegetable oil is the basis of every dressing, dip, and sauce used in restaurant food. My last newsletter went into depth about just how bad this stuff is for you.
So what can you do? I have had several patients that have started using food delivery services like Hello Fresh and Blue Apron that provide you with all the ingredients you need to make delicious and healthy meals. All the prep work – the cleaning and chopping and measuring and recipes are done for you, so it is super easy to prepare a good healthy meal. But cooking still has to happen. You still have to have a stove or oven and cooking utensils. What if you really hate that whole scene? What can you do? The take-out seems like the only alternative unless you happen to spy a good pre-made meal at your grocery store. NO, I am not talking about frozen TV dinners. Read the ingredients on those things. It is scary. I am talking about meals prepared by the store fresh that day. The choice is not great, but some good options do exist. The problem here is that you would have to go shopping every day to make that a real happening.
The other day I was cruising down San Juan Avenue heading for my favorite store, Costco, when I spied a new sign on a building as I was crossing Greenback Lane. Off to the right was a new sign that said MealPro.com. It was on a building that used to house a company that made a vegetable burger that sold briefly in the stores. I was curious, so I looked up MealPro.com on my computer when I got home. I was impressed by what I saw. This looked like a possible remedy for all my patients that don’t cook. They are a meal subscription service that caters to special needs. They make meals to custom fit your needs to a large degree, and they cover a wide variety of needs. You could go keto easily, and you could go vegetarian. You can adapt the meals to have more or less protein as per your needs. And most importantly, as I looked at the ingredients, they are being very health conscious. They offer a very wide selection of dishes, and that selection rotates every so often.
Even more astounding is that the individual meal price is very reasonable – in the $9 to $12 range. Amazing for a fairly custom meal that is actually healthy. Even the packaging is recyclable. You order several meals at once and put a few in the fridge for the next few days and the rest in the freezer for later in the week or month. The meal is fully plated and ready to eat. All you have to do is heat it in the microwave for 3 to 5 minutes or in the oven for half an hour. This sounds simple enough that even those who don’t cook at all can have a healthy “home-cooked” meal. Who knows, someday I might want a week off from cooking and just kick back and let them do the work.
If that sounds like it might be of interest to you, here is a link to their website. Check it out and see if it might fit your needs – particularly these days with us staying indoors instead of getting out and spending half an hour looking for something edible on the menu of the restaurant we have gone to. I still like going out to eat. The whole ambiance and feel of getting out is nice. And I still will eat some of those sweet potato fries every month or two. Too much stress about avoiding toxic food is in itself toxic. The idea is to be aware and make good choices most of the time, but don’t be afraid of food to the extent that you never eat anything bad. Accept that it is bad and that you will pay the price and move on. Stress is just as bad as toxic food, so relax and enjoy some of the time.
Take care,
David