The saying you are what you eat does not mean you will turn into a bag of potato chips if you eat a bag of potato chips. However, it does mean that those potato chips will show if you eat enough of them. Healthy, natural diets are apparent in our overall health. Unhealthy, processed foods show up as poor health and weight gain. In order to ensure that you are ingesting the best possible foods for your health, you have to know what you are eating and looks can sometimes be deceiving.
Food Groups
One of the basics of knowing what you eat is knowing what food groups you require and eating from those food groups. Making sure you get enough meat, fruits, vegetables and grains is key to a healthy diet. Nonetheless, this is not enough. It is possible to get too much of one food group and not enough of another, so a balance is very important. Furthermore, some foods belong to a required food group, but are not particularly healthy. For example, steak is a meat product, but it is usually packed with fat and cholesterol.
Labels
Food labeling has become more comprehensive and more accurate over the years. For the most part, we can depend on food labels to tell us what is in our food. Read these labels to get an idea of what you are ingesting and eliminate products that contain unhealthy additives. Of course, this only works if you educate yourself on what to avoid and what to seek. In general, going for fresh food instead of packaged food is the safest bet.
Cooking From Scratch
Getting all-natural ingredients and cooking from scratch is a wonderful way to ensure that you know what you are eating. However, cooking fresh ingredients from scratch still often requires packaged products like flour, cooking oil and the like. Even these basic cooking staples can contain unwanted extras. Be sure to check labels, even if they say “all-natural” or “organic.” This labeling can be ambiguous and many an unhealthy food has been labeled all-natural or organic.
Food Knowledge
Knowledge of natural foods is important to knowing what you are eating. That is because most food that is straight from a farm or a garden does not have a label. Therefore, it helps to know what meats, fruits and vegetables have what vitamins and minerals. Just knowing it is fresh is not enough. If you are not getting enough of specific vitamins and minerals, you could have health problems. One solution is taking an all-natural multi-vitamin, but there still is no replacing the nourishment of food.
Once you know what you are eating, you know what effect it has on you. You can control weight gain and even prevent some diseases by making the right food choices. If you do not know what you are eating, those choices are harder to make.