Shop Around The Perimeter

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 Your Shopping Cart Should Be Raw & Colorful

The advent of industrialization has changed everything about the way we humans live, including the way we eat. The industrialization of our global food system has led many to eat a diet that would have looked completely alien, even 100 years ago.

Subsequently, our health has suffered; the hallmark of what our industrialized food system has wrought on our health is the nationwide epidemic of obesity and all of its subsequent health risks.

We can blame a number of things for this––our high-stress lifestyle, lack of exercise, sedentary lifestyle, or the cocktail of prescription drugs that list weight gain as a side effect––but the majority of the blame rests squarely on our plate.

Part of the problem with the industrialization of our food system is what lies at its foundation. Our industrialized food system rests on a foundation of a few staple crops, including corn, wheat, soy and peanuts. These are in virtually all processed foods, and in many, they constitute the primary ingredients. Subsequently, these are the foods that form the foundation of many people’s diets.

One of the problems with these foods is that they are often contaminated with fungal poisons, known as mycotoxins. One study implicated corn as being universally contaminated with mycotoxins.

Mycotoxins are among the most poisonous, naturally occurring chemicals on planet earth. They’ve been implicated in a variety of diseases. Unfortunately, because of the way foods like wheat, corn, soy, and peanuts are grown, their contamination with mold and fungi are virtually inevitable; subsequently, mycotoxin contamination is always a risk with these foods.

In addition to the fact that what most people eat every day is comprised of simple, processed carbohydrates (that are likely contaminated with mycotoxins), much of the processed food people eat every day is loaded with a host of additives, dyes, stabilizers, preservatives and other chemicals. Some of these have been implicated in health problems; others likely should. Eventually, it would be unsurprising if they all were not implicated as affecting our health negatively.

This is what we Americans eat every day in the form of our prepackaged food, fast food, snack food, and convenience store food.

Fortunately, there is a way to skip this. Shop around the perimeter of the grocery store. Your cart will be filled with foods that have one ingredient on the list––real food.

Your cart should be filled with colorful vegetables, lean meats, eggs, fresh fruits, nuts, and seeds. Herbs, spices, and sea salt should be your flavoring agents. Any processed foods should be minimally processed––almond butter that is just almonds and maybe sea salt; ground beef or turkey; extra virgin, cold pressed oils, etc. And the preservative should be your refrigerator or your freezer.

It does not take a statistician to realize that as we’ve moved away from eating whole, real foods, our health has declined. Use the perimeter of the grocery store as your guide, and see how it affects your health.

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