Clean Eating? As we become more interested in how we eat, and the implications on our body and health, we also begin to understand that
· Food that is not made for immediate consumption, whether canned, packaged, frozen, or processed in some way or another, has to be treated and made differently from food that is made fresh from scratch in order to last and be tasty.
· Restaurant and take-out foods are also prepared differently from homemade food. We seem to expect more intense flavors, hence more salt, sugar and fat are often used, and sometimes even MSG as a flavor enhancer. Recently a restaurant and take-out place opened in NYC that advertised offering “Clean Chinese,” inferring that Chinese food in general may be sugary and MSG laced. Sure enough, Chinese restaurateurs were in uproar over the generalized inference.
Clean eating has become a term for unadulterated food made without stabilizers, preservatives, flavor enhancers, added vitamins, food coloring, or other additives – food without side effects. If you don’t buy processed foods to use in your home cooking (remember the recipes from the 60s that called for canned mushroom soup as a casserole ingredient?) you eat clean by default. Clean eating is easier on your body and the liver, our filter, in particular. Clean eating assures a better distribution between calories and actual nutritional value since many ingredients in processed foods of any kind have no intrinsic nutritional value (such as minerals, trace elements, vitamins, chlorophyll, or fiber) but are there to create flavor and maintain shelf life. Clean eating provides a more authentic and direct taste simply with the primary ingredients of a dish. Is it surprising that clean eating is more colorful as well?
In short, clean eating gives you more bang, meaning health, for the buck.