Real Food Challenge, Part 2

Part 2
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"You have to put everything into perspective. With any diet, you never want to follow it to such an extreme there's something wrong with it."
--Of course, the 'dietician' idea that eliminating 'things that are not food' is an extreme is interesting. I think saturated fat-phobia is extreme, not to mention a 20th century fad, scientifically unsupported, and a violation of common sense.

"I thought we ate healthy," said Kassandra Mier, a challenge participant. "I didn't think it'd be a problem. It was tougher than I thought. Trying to have a breakfast that didn't have anything processed was time-consuming." In the morning, she ground oats and buckwheat to make pancakes and waffles. She pan-fried eggs and made hash browns from scratch. The upside was her children had such hearty breakfasts, they rarely asked for snacks.
--This is an interesting thought; eating a plate full of home made carbs (waffles and hash browns? Wonder is they were also smothered in syrup or honey?) was a noticeable improvement from what her family had been eating. Wow.
But not every participant had such a smooth transition into traditional foods. After the pantry purge, a trip to the grocery store stunned her. "There's little real food in them," she said. "That was kind of a shock to realize how limited the choices were."
--It IS a shock when one finally is confronted with how much engineered food we are accustomed to eating. I've often day dreamed about what a 'real food' grocery store would look like .... Meat, veggies, fruit, nuts, seeds, a few oils, perhaps some jerky, raw milk; you could put a 'real food' store in the space of a gas station food mart.
"Real food costs more, because it's worth more," said Nina Planck, author of "Real Food: What to Eat and Why." It's a common complaint about real foods, and it boils down to priorities, Planck said. "You need to think about where and how you want to spend your money ...
--The equation above is a big deal. What's the 'cost' of marginalized health? We have learned to divorce our thoughts about food cost and health cost, but everyone who's given it a moment's thought knows these two are joined at the hip. And the costs are not just monetary. What is the "cost" of pain from unnecessarily inflammatory diets? If you save money on pain meds by eating real food, will you notice and count the difference? What is the "cost" of poor quality sleep and frustration about body fat accumulation issues from eating engineered food? What is the cost of premature aging? Of treatments from the diseases of the West? Should we count statins in our assessment of the cost of the American diet? How about kidney dialysis? Insulin treatments and blood glucose monitors and strips? These 'medical costs' are directly related to the weird economics of the industrial food production model we currently embrace, with cost curves bent by food subsidies and freakish farm policies and a 200,000 members strong Department of Agriculture (primarily a lever by which the industrial players manipulate markets). If we divorced our food production from oil derived fertilizers, we might reduce our national consumption of oil by 15% initially (eventually, the impact of decreased demand would tend to reduce the consumer cost for gasoline, which should lead to increased demand for same). At the same time, food costs would rapidly increase, and there's a real question of whether we could ever produce enough food to feed our nation without putting oil into our corn and therefore our cattle via amonium nitrate (did you know every cow you eat is about a half barrel of crude oil? And everything vegatable that you eat is probably oil of a like proportion. Thus the appeal of hunting, raising your own chickens, and vegetable gardening).
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/23/real.food.challenge/index.html