It’s called “reading,” and most people aren’t doing it while stocking up at the grocery store.

Over the past 100 or so years, food has evolved immensely! With an extremely large spike in the overall world population (now estimated at over 7 billion people), more food is needed to feed the masses, but with this comes a host of downsides regarding food quality.

Nowadays, millions of people aren’t eating “real food” anymore; rather, most are consuming “food-like products,” – falsely flavored, deceptively colored, chemically saturated items that are engineered to taste and look a certain way.

So what is one to do?

If you can’t read it, don’t eat it! This is a universal rule that all people should implement whenever shopping for food, and the best part is that it only takes about five seconds to complete.

Here’s the process:

• Pick up an item at the store.
• Turn that product around.
• Read the ingredient list.
• Place that product into a category in your mind. If it’s hard to understand what’s printed on the ingredient label, if the ingredient label looks like some type of chemical list for a science experiment, it wouldn’t be a good choice.

The key here is to keep selections of real quality (actual food) – words that are easy to understand, e.g., organic chicken, water, organic celery, Himalayan salt, grass-fed butter, coconut oil, and organic almonds. It’s easy to see that these types of ingredients are easy to recognize and are equally great for maintaining an optimal level of health. By implementing this trick, consumers can begin to filter out the junk that the body has a hard time processing. From additives like MSG to damaging chemical food colorings, one will find that keeping their selections of pure quality can ultimately lead to optimum health if they start reading their ingredient labels rather than “counting their calories.” Logically speaking, if the overall demand stops for processed food, the actual food manufacturers will have to stop producing these types of products. If the public demands healthy selections, healthy food shall follow… It truly is that easy.

With that said, the problem still points to the consumers. If demand remains high, production will continue – the change begins with what’s in demand. Think about this… The human body prefers what it is able to recognize, and in this case, that would refer to real, wholesome organic food. When processed and preserved items are thrown into the mix, the body, in a sense, has a hard time dealing with such an influx. Disease rates are sky-high, people are dying off very preventable conditions, obesity is more common today than 100 years ago, and much of it has to do with food choices.

Furthermore, synthetic food products often trigger an immune response in your body, because it’s unnatural and your body considers it a toxin or foreign invader. These immune responses tend to be low-grade, so you don’t notice it right away, but it wears on your system throughout the years, often leading to full-blown autoimmune disorders like Lupus or Hashimoto’s Disease or even diabetes.

It all ties back to the selections that people are making, and if this problem is to be tackled and dealt with accordingly, we all must change the ways in which we buy and eat our meals. In the end, the choice is up to us–the consumers–who vote with our dollars.

P.S. Fat Is Good

When reading food labels don’t panic over the amount of fat listed as long as it’s a Good Fat. There is a longstanding and very resilient fallacy that has dug its way into our collective unconscious: eating fat makes you fat. This is simply not true. Of course, it sort of makes sense that people might make that connection, but it’s wrong. Sugar makes you fat more than anything. Fat is actually really good for you–as long as it’s the right kind. Here’s a list of some foods with good fat:

• Coconut oil
• Avocados
• Olives
• Nuts (almonds, walnuts, peanuts, macadamia nuts, hazelnuts, pecans, cashews)
• Peanut butter (all-natural, with no sugar added though)
• Seeds (Sunflower, sesame, pumpkin seeds, flaxseed)
• Fatty fish (tuna, salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines)
• Butter (grass-fed, organic)
• Cheese (raw)
• Eggs (free-range, organic)