Whole Foods

Welcome to the first issue of From Belly to Baby. As a naturopathic doctor with a background in nutrition, I hope to make this column an informative resource that makes eating well simple and pleasurable, for parents, kids and moms to be.

In my practice, I am often asked to make sense of all the conflicting nutrition and diet information that bombards us daily in the media and grocery store shelves. The secret to figuring out how to eat well does not require a degree in biochemistry, but is rather simple, and can be illustrated by a simple thought exercise. The rule I use is this: imagine what you could eat if you only had a knife, a heat source and your hands for harvesting and preparing that food. No factories, no tractors, no processing. Well, we can plant and harvest a huge variety of vegetables and fruits with our hands. We can also sow grains with our hands, and could, if required, grind that grain into flour using stones. With our heat source, that flour can now become whole wheat bread. Bread made from flour, water and yeast. No sodium propionate, sugar, margarine or colour in the bread, and no snow white Wonder bread! We can butcher animals with our knife, and also produce milk, butter, real cheese and gather eggs with our hands. But we could not make margarine. Sounds like a pretty tasty diet, doesn't it? This is what I call a "whole foods" diet. That is, food in its natural state, with no processing beyond what we can do with our hands, heat or fermentation. This way of eating provides us with food that is extremely dense in all nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, beneficial fats, and protein, and very low in sugar, harmful fats and empty calories, and is appropriate for children, adults and pregnant and nursing women.

For a longer discussion on real food and how to find it, I strongly recommend the book In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. It is an empowering book, describing how for decades, the public has been relying on nutrition experts to deconstruct food into its separate parts, which is then fed back to us in "new and improved" processed foods marketed to promote health. Despite this expertise, North Americans are sicker than ever.

I welcome your questions and comments, and would like to use future issues to publish answers to any questions you may have regarding eating well for pregnancy or nutrition for children. Future topic ideas include food allergies, examining where to buy good quality, locally produced meats and produce, and fad diets. I look forward to hearing from you!