When you’re cutting back on fast food, you will get cravings for it. There are many reasons for this, but don’t discount the addictive quality of it. Resisting the siren call of the drive-thru can be difficult, but once your body is used to nutrient-rich, whole food alternatives, when your constantly inflated inflammation levels recede, and especially when you’ve gotten better at cooking your own food, fast food starts to lose its appeal. Indulging now and then is fine, but personally I find these fast food meals dingy and sad. There are very few fast food, or fast casual, meals that I still actively want to eat.
There are a lot of reasons why fast food is simply not a good long term solution for sustenance, not least of which is the fact that it simply lacks in nutrition quality. There is too much focus on calories, fat, and carbs, but these approaches are overly simplified. You can’t simply look at a fast food meal and judge its value based on calories alone. Calories have value as a guideline, but avoiding a food because it’s “high calorie” or finding a food acceptable due to being “low calorie” misses too much of what nutrition is about. If we could subsist on calories alone, we could all take swigs from a bottle of oil for all our meals. “A calorie is a calorie” is not only misguided due to what lies underneath those calories, but because the different macronutrients perform different functions and require varying amounts of calories themselves in order to digest them.
How to Focus on Nutrients
It’s not as much work to track your diet as you may think. There are apps to easily do it on your phone, like cronometer and my fitness pal, but you do need a scale to precisely measure these things. I don’t know about my fitness pal, but cronometer often has eyeball-able measurements when tracking foods, for example you can estimate that your apple is “medium sized” and pick that from the dropdown. What’s important, however, is that you pick the food option with the most nutrients listed because the purpose is not to track calories, but nutrients. If you don’t use a tracker, it’s nearly impossible to really know what you’re getting in your diet since you would have to individually look up the nutrition profile of each thing you ate - no thanks!
While there’s surely attention paid to nutrients, there is a prevailing, dismissive myth under nearly all of them that “most people get enough [nutrient] from their diets”. This is probably not true for a variety of reasons. If you track your nutrients for a week without changing your diet at all, you may be quite shocked at the final averages for the week. Even I, someone who pays very close attention to my nutrient consumption, have never hit the “recommended daily value” of every nutrient any single week in my 90+ days of close monitoring. It requires an intensively proactive, mindful diet to hit these marks, and the spread of these nutrients throughout all the different possible food sources is wide. If you never eat certain things, you’re almost certainly deficient in something.
The nutrient levels in produce have been rapidly decreasing, world-wide, since the 1950s when industrial farming practices and chemical fertilizers started to rapidly deplete the level of minerals in the soil where our food is grown (google “soil depletion”). Livestock in industrial meat factories are fed the same nutrient-poor, grain-based slop that comes from those same fields, which not only produces less nutritious meat, but makes the animals, particularly cows, less healthy overall - they are not grain eaters! Chicken meat and egg companies boast that their chickens are “vegetarian fed” - which is a ploy, a feel-good advertisement claim that is actually a red flag. Chickens are omnivores and they love meat and protein. These vegetarian-fed boasts means their hens are malnourished.
Very few foods have a particularly high nutrient load and certain things are quite sparse in our diets. You can only imagine how much worse this is for someone who is highly restrictive in the types of foods they eat, no matter whether it’s meat or vegetables or carbohydrates! While industrial food practices are very depressing and do produce much less nutritious food, there is only so much you can do if you’re on a budget. That means it’s not surprising that who is limited in the variety of food they can acquire cannot regularly hit every micronutrient mark for the week. As we will repeat for now and forever, any effort is better than nothing. While I’m disappointed that I can’t meet my marks, I am not discouraged - I just try my best every day.
Is There a Shortcut?
You may be wondering at this point, if we cannot easily hit our micronutrient needs with foods, should we be using supplements? The answer is complicated and very tricky. Supplementation for certain things can be very good, while some kinds of supplements can actively harm you. “Multi-vitamins” are actually particularly harmful unless they are incredibly mindfully made, as supplementing things like folic acid, iron, cyanocobalamin, and ascorbic acid can have negative effects on your body. While it’s possible there is a very mindfully made multi vitamin out there, I’ve certainly never seen one, and due to each person’s unique micronutrient needs, supplementing individual nutrients as needed is a much simpler and safer approach. I currently do supplement, but my focus is on magnesium and folate in MTHF-5 form, the latter because I’m actively breastfeeding and require more folate than an average person. A more in-depth look at this will surely be featured in a future post. The short answer is that there is no quick and easy shortcut out of getting most of your nutrients from your food.
So What Should I Eat?
This is tricky because we all have unique tastes, resources, food availability, and cooking skills. Some people also have different advice tolerances - some people simply want to be told what to eat and don’t care why, while others require more information. I’ll do my best to accommodate whatever your resources, skills, and advice-tolerances are in the following suggestions.
Superfoods
A somewhat overused phrase, the term “superfood” refers to something high in a variety of nutrients. While imperfect, using these as a guideline for things to include in your diet is a low-effort method of covering a wider micronutrient spread. Some notable “superfoods” include avocados, liver (any, as well as cod livers), salmon, sardines, eggs, dark leafy green vegetables, fermented foods (with active probiotics, trickier to find for things other than yogurt and kefir), extra virgin olive oil, chia and flax seeds (soaked or fermented), oysters, orange and purple vegetables and fruits, grapefruit, raw honey, and milk. These foods contribute a good spread of valuable nutrients or other healthy and beneficial substances to your body.
A certain subset of health-focused people are waiting for me to explain - the better sourced these things, the healthier they are. As touched on above, industrial farming practices produce less nutritious food. Sometimes the way these things are grown and processed cause actively harmful attributes. In certain online spheres, people will condemn factory farmed meat, pasteurized milk, and farmed fish as practically poisonous. The sentiment is fully understandable, and they are surely correct that less mindfully produced food likely has some negative impacts - but what happens when you simply do not have the resources to access these healthier, better sourced foods? There are simply no other options. Factory farmed meat, supermarket pasteurized milk and dairy, soy-fed chicken eggs, farm raised fish, and non-organic vegetables are better than the alternatives - which is to say, there are no alternatives. If you cannot afford pasture raised eggs, raw milk (which can be as much as $15/gal), and wild caught salmon from only the lowest microplastic saturated seas, there is no real alternative to the lower-cost options. You simply do the best you can with what you have.
There are some important things to note about certain kinds of food, however, that are actually better to forgo completely than accept lower-quality alternatives. I’d like to focus on one of the suggested foods above - raw honey. Bad quality honey is unacceptable and totally useless for your body. Not only does filtered and cooked honey provide little to no value, but these lower quality honeys are highly likely to simply not be real honey. I know, it seems unbelievable that a company could actually sell a bottle of honey, label it honey, put “honey” as the only ingredient, and have it not be honey, but that’s simply the reality. Being able to tell the difference is tough, but one surefire way is to see what happens after you open it and then leave it in the pantry for several months without touching it. If it has not crystalized or started to crystalize, it’s fake. Real honey crystalizes over time. In case you were worried, by the way, this crystallization does not harm the honey and is totally fine to eat.
Real raw honey provides nutrients and other substances that are helpful to your body, from antimicrobial properties to multiple vitamin D compounds. Raw honey noticeably clears up my sinuses and helps many people alleviate their allergies, specifically with raw honey sourced locally. There appears to be a lack of hard evidence for this feature of raw honey, but large numbers of people have reported its effectiveness. There's little downside to trying it if you have seasonal allergies. While pasteurized milk and farm raised salmon are better than nothing, only ever buy trustworthy raw honey.
What to avoid
While we’re obviously avoiding fast food, processed food is also not so good. If you don’t have the budget or are otherwise weaning yourself off of processed food slowly, there are some things inside of processed food that you’ll especially want to try and avoid. While this list seems very exhaustive, we have found many products that lack all of these, so don’t despair if you’re not quite willing to give up the time-saving convenience of processed food just yet. You can always gauge your own leniency in what things you’re willing to consume and how often, but these are the suggestions I would make.
Things to Avoid
Enriched products
Conventional wheat products
Artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and colors
Trans fats or partially hydrogenated oils
Soy in all forms
Canola, cottonseed, grapeseed, corn, safflower, peanut, and rice bran oils, all kinds
Sunflower oil that is not “high oleic”
Explaining all of these is something I can surely do, but if you are uninterested and simply wanted a cheat sheet of things to avoid, you can happily skip the next few paragraphs.
Enriched products, conventional wheat products, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and colors, trans fats
Enriched products are “fortified” the same way multivitamins are made - with iron lacking in bioavailability and synthetic folic acid. These additions are more likely to harm your body than help it. Avoiding conventional wheat products will help your gut health - the residual glyphosate is a known cause of leaky gut syndrome. Artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and colors are all tested in isolation, meaning their interactions with one another are basically totally unknown, not to mention that there are still many known issues with many of them. There is simply no need to put these into your body. Trans-fats, sometimes labeled as partially hydrogenated oils, is a fat your body does not need. It lowers your HDL cholesterol and has been linked to many other health issues.
Soy
Soy, while used for centuries and potentially acceptable as organic, non-GMO in small amounts, is typically GMO in the United States. Soy has been eaten for a long time, but soy and its many byproducts are in everything, so most people are overdosing on it. There is evidence that it’s an endocrine disruptor, though there are conflicting studies. There are conflicting conclusions from studies on soy as a phytoestrogen, as some studies claim soy can lower rates of breast cancer and other women’s health issues, but phytoestrogens as a category have been linked to increased rates of breast cancer and women’s health issues. Considering the huge conflict of interest (soy is a $40 billion dollar industry in the United States alone), it may be best to sit soy out.
Vegetable oils
Currently a hot button issue, the listed “vegetable oils” are becoming trendy to avoid in the same way the gluten-free movement began, which makes a lot of people suspicious about whether or not it’s actually a valid concern. The fact of the matter is, these oils are almost always chemically processed through disruptive mechanisms that reduce their value as food in the same way the food industry degrades the value of our other foods. Most importantly, these oils are abnormally high in omega-6, a polyunsaturated fatty acid.
Omega-6 is a necessary fat, but the average person is constantly overdosing on it. Required in balance with omega-3, another polyunsaturated fat, an excess of omega-6 causes health problems in the exact same way that any number of beneficial substances can be harmful if consumed in excess. Research on omega-3 and omega-6 is spotty and many studies don’t account for all of the important variables when considering these fats and often study them in isolation, which simply doesn’t work as our bodies do not function within isolated parameters. While we have traditionally always consumed omega-6, and it absolutely is a vital nutrient, we simply eat too much of it. The simplest way to reduce your omega-6 intake is to drop these oils from your diet.
The goal of limiting omega-6 is to balance your omega-3 and omega-6 intake. “Limiting” omega-6 is not to be read the same way as one may “limit” refined sugar - omega-6 is necessary and we require about 12 (for women) to 17 (for men) grams daily for ideal body function. The fact of the matter is, it is so dramatically ever-present in our current food supply that there is no way you’re going to reduce your intake without avoiding these vegetable oils, and no way to reach a balance of omega fatty acids without more omega-3. There is a lot to go on about on this topic, but suffice to say that omega-3 is present in fatty seafood and you should be eating a lot more of it.
Non-high Oleic sunflower oil
I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about sunflower oil. Lumped in with the others (except peanut oil seems to have been given a pardon) and referred to by some circles as “the hateful eight”, sunflower oil is naturally high in omega-6 as well. Sunflowers have been being bred more recently to reduce their omega-6 content in lieu of omega-9 and thus high oleic sunflower oil is higher in monounsaturated fats. High oleic sunflower oil has only 9% of its total fatty acid profile as polyunsaturated fats, and so it’s much lower in omega-6. For comparison, extra virgin olive oil actually also has omega-6, potentially varying in amounts from 3-20%, so 9% is doing pretty well. You should always opt for cold pressed and unrefined if possible, which means many products containing high oleic sunflower oil may still be less than ideal, but if we’re going to give leeway to any of “the hateful eight”, high oleic sunflower oil is surely the least offensive of the bunch. You can simply the process by avoiding it entirely, as well. It’s up to you.
Short Term Changes
The last thing I’ll say about how to focus on nutrition in your diet is that you may need to give up simple carbs, at least for a period of time, to find ways to satiate your appetite and nourish yourself without them. Pasta, including ramen, bread, crackers, and other refined carbohydrate products are nutritionally empty but easy to gorge on with high calorie impacts. If you can succeed at getting full on practically anything else, it’s likely to help you figure out what you like to eat and what will actually make you less hungry throughout the day.
While many people demonize carbohydrates entirely, it seems to me to be an overreaction. Ketogenic diets have helped many people overcome serious illnesses and the diet itself is a great tool. I fully believe it is helping or has helped a substantial number of people, but once you have “corrected” these problems, all the evidence points to it being possible to stop doing Keto and resume, responsibly, eating carbohydrates. I think there is a time and place for cutting carbohydrates from your diet, but I don’t think that they are inherently bad for us.
Wrapping Up
This topic is so vast that there are two previous parts to this series! Hopefully you stuck in there until the end and found some inspiration for new changes to make to your shopping list. This is the last part of the Replacing Fast Food series, check out the previous posts below.