Are healthy foods REALLY healthy for YOU? {Foodie Talk with Chef John & Anne}

Eating healthy foods should not be this complicated!

It does not take long when you decide it is time to eat more healthy foods to realize that this process can be much more complicated and take longer than you ever imagined! But don’t let this discourage you to the point of abandoning the effort completely.

Take baby steps so you don’t get overwhelmed. Educate yourself. Pick the area that is most pressing for you and start there. But do something if you value your health and quality of life as you age!

Our experiences

Our personal experiences with this topic began with our journey of discovering food sensitivities. We will share much more on that another day, but one of the problem foods for me was spinach, due to it being a food with a high level of salicylates.

See the picture of the kale above? Much better option for me. So I’m learning to use kale or other types of greens in place of spinach when possible. I can have some foods with salicylates… I just have to be careful with the threshold of what will work for me day-to-day on a cumulative basis. So since I like other high-salicylate foods a lot more than spinach, I like to save my “salicylate intake” for those foods, such as peanut butter and strawberries! And still, sometimes I over do it.

Healthy Foods Gauge #1

So the first way one can gauge if an otherwise healthy food is healthy for them is to figure out whether or not they have any food sensitivities. As our Nutritionist, Suzzanne Myer, explained to us before we did her elimination diet, this can be tricky because you can have delayed reactions to foods or you can misunderstand a reaction.

You can read much more about food sensitivities on her website: EliminationDiet.com. She goes into the most common types of symptoms her clients have experienced as a result of “problem foods” for them. It’s amazing how symptoms vary for the same foods from person to person! We are each very uniquely created.

Healthy Foods Gauge #2

Another thing to consider when deciding whether or not a food is truly healthy is whether or not the food has GMOs in it. We go into more of this with our guest for today’s Blog Talk Radio episode of Foodie Talk with Chef John and Anne. You can listen to that show in the player below.

We also went into a lot of details about GMOs and the growing movement by many states to require labeling in these two previous episodes of the show, which aired last week:

GMOs: What every American needs to know

GMO Labeling: Is your state involved?

Healthy Foods Gauge #3

Learn how to identify the “healthy food buzz words” often used by marketers that usually do nothing more than give the appearance of health, when in reality, the food product may be no healthier for you. Listen to our show below for which buzz words are most commonly used and how you can shop with greater confidence as a consumer when reading labels in the store.

The Show

We welcome our guest, Jaimi Ellison, for this episode to discuss this very important topic. Jaimi is a Nutritionist and also works as a Personal Trainer at her fitness and rehab facility, Santa Cruz Core, in Santa Cruz, California. She partners with individuals from all over to achieve optimal health.

Do you have any food sensitivities or allergies? Have you eliminated GMO-foods from your diet and experienced an improvement in your health? We would love to hear from you…. please leave us a comment with what your experiences have been!

And don’t forget to use the share buttons below to share this with others who would appreciate having the information to use in their own journey towards healthier eating… together, we can make meaningful changes for a healthier future.

About the Author

Adopted at age 2, grew up in the Charlotte, NC area. Obtained Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Appalachian State University. Loves being a Mom of two and taste-testing Chef John's culinary creations and sharing them with readers.

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