You are What You Eat!! ~ Health & Nutrition Blog

There’s a lot being said about food these days, where it comes from, what’s in it, how does it affect me. My patients will often ask me about what supplements to take, if this or that vitamin will help them, should everything be organic. At the grocery store you’ll see many foods labeled organic, grass fed, free range and whole grain. How do you sift through all this to eat a healthy diet and what is that healthy diet. Certainly, with the rising numbers of younger people suffering from diabetes and obesity and the advent of books such as “Fast Food Nation” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and films like “Food Inc.” the importance of the food we eat has never seemed to be more central a topic. In fact, for generations eating what was in season and getting your eggs, meat and vegetables from the farm down the road was taken for granted. Now, we’re beginning to rediscover that that more simple, straightforward, more connected way of eating was a lot better for us than eating inexpensive, quickly prepared, more processed food. You might say that good food is good medicine.

But I don’t like to think of food as medicine. Medicine is given to repair something but the body, for the most part, repairs itself and uses the nutrients from food to help it function properly. We can decipher how the body uses the different vitamins and minerals for normal function and do, on occasion, recommend supplements to fill in the gaps but there is no substitute for getting your nutrients from the food you eat. So you might think, then, that food is the fuel for the body but that, too, does not give the full picture.

At the risk of harkening back too much to the hippie roots of my Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, food is nourishment rather than just fuel. It invokes memory and connects us to one another and the earth. Who can’t wait for those special dishes around the Holidays or those other gatherings of family and friends that make up much of our photo albums. In these celebrations lie the seeds of, not only our good physical health, but our mental and social health as well. Again, what we eat also connects us to the earth in a very literal way. The cells and molecules of what we eat get digested and converted into usable forms that are then used and incorporated into us. (So if you eat like crap, you’ll feel like crap.) The Slow Food Movement that started in Northern Italy and which has been championed in the US by local chef and author Alice Waters has been trying to reconnect us to the food we eat so that school children will know that chickens do not come wrapped in plastic naturally.

A simple way to connect yourself to your nourishment is to try to eat most of your food from local sources and, in so doing, you will be living by the seasons. You will not be eating peaches and watermelon in winter but will be anxiously awaiting their arrival in summer. Locally grown fruits and vegetables will not have to travel as far to reach you, will be fresher when you buy them and be less likely lose their nutritional value by the time you eat them. Even locally raised meats will be more likely to be grass fed and more healthfully raised and thus better for us. As a kid my family used to drive up to a small butcher shop just outside Sonoma where the cows were grazing in the back to buy half a cow to split with my Aunt and Uncle. The meat would last us at least half a year in the freezer and it was an economical way to feed a family of five children. Now I’ve started taking my kids up to Terra Firma Farm in Petaluma where they can see the chickens and cows and rows of vegetables and we can come home with fresh produce, eggs, and meat.

In France, a restaurant is judged by how well it uses its local products, not by how exotic its food is. Here in the Bay Area we have food products that are second to none and, so, ample opportunity to eat nutritious, healthy food throughout the year. As I like to tell my patients, “You really don’t want to see much of me.” And so to do that be part of your local scene and visit your local farmer’s market more often and live by the seasons. Taste, savor and enjoy your food with good company. You really are what you eat.

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