Real Food Challenge, Part 1

The article linked below is akin to the "Paleo Challenge" many CrossFitters have read about. It's a well written article. I've inserted a few editorial comments below. I should thank the 'registered dietician' industry for providing the world with so many half baked nutritional ideas and thus making massive quantities of blog fodder.
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The task set by a food blogger seemed deceptively simple: Eat real food for a month.
More than 900 people signed up for the challenge, and some were confident that it would not be difficult to avoid processed foods for 28 days. But in the age of potato powders, cheese in a squirt can and microwaveable meals, eating only "real food" turned out to be much more difficult. On Day One of the challenge, blogger Jennifer McGruther gave this instruction: Purge your pantry of processed foods. This meant everything with refined oils, white flour, sugar, low- and skimmed-milk products, margarine, processed cheeses, refined salt and dried pastas had to go. "It doesn't matter if the foods are organic or not. Toss them anyway," she said. "You may well have paid good money for the food at one time, but remember, real health comes from real food, and real food never comes from a box."
Neither a chef nor a nutritionist, McGruther is a full-time real estate office manager and a mother from Crested Butte, Colorado, who enjoys cooking and blogging at NourishedKitchen.com."
--The fact that she's not a nutritionist correlates with her common sense about food.
"Throughout the month, McGruther taught readers how to render lard to avoid refined oils, sprout grain, cultivate yogurt and make cheese instead of using premade convenience products from the store."
Processed food is defined as any food that has undergone a change of character. For example, edamame would be unprocessed, and tofu would be processed.
"I like the idea of less processed foods, but you can find healthy stuff in a package, too," she said, pointing to low-fat milk, sliced apples and unsalted canned vegetables as examples.
--There's just nothing good about low fat milk. Industrial food industry milk, organic or otherwise, has many potential issues:
-high temps from processing yeilds undesirable structural changes in the milk
-milk from industrial cows is far less nutritious than milk from pastured cows (one gives you milk created by oil with some help from sun, the other gives milk created by sun and soil alone)
-milk has been shown to produce a dis-proportionate insulin response relative to the amount of sugar it contains (http://www.paleodiet.com/)
Skim milk has all of these problems, but they are exacerbated by the lack of fat. If you like milk and don't mind the potential issues associated with drinking milk produced by industrial farming techniques and the necessity of both ultra pasteurization and homogenization you should still drink only whole milk. If you think milk fat is bad, just wait until you meet the insulin spiking power of skim milk; might as well just inject the fat into your love handles and skip drinking the milk altogether.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/23/real.food.challenge/index.html