My view on...Foods

An second article of "My View..." series.

I believe that the ‘Food Pyramid’ is a good guidance for food consumption in terms of health concern and economic sustainability.

Foods should not be wasted. Don’t order more than we can eat, and take leftover home if possible. If the taste of the foods is not very good, but still acceptable, don’t waste them.

Don’t be too picky on foods. Organic foods are good, but they are not must. Certainly, fresh foods are preferable.

Try not to eat ‘processed’ foods if possible, pick the natural one. E.g. drink water rather than soda, eat meat rather than ham or sausages, and eat fresh veggie rather than canned food. Don’t buy many candies, or things look very unnatural with fancy colors.

Don’t put too many seasonings in dishes. Try to taste the tastes of foods. Chicken should taste like chicken. Fish should taste like fish. If you put too many seasonings, most likely you will only end up tasting salt and need to drink a lot of water.

Try to learn cooking. Don’t need to be a great chef, but we should all learn the basic skills in cooking. Namely, how to select foods in the market, how to wash, cut, and basic seasoning, how to cook them as well. How to steam, stir fry, or roost. It should be considered as a basic skill for survival. It is difficult to be a great cook, but it is not difficult to cook.

Eat less meat but more veggie. Going to extreme as vegan is great, but be a part-time vegetarian is good. Though I like meat, veggie is healthier. Should treat meat as guilty pleasure than must-have dishes. Also, watch out the portion. There are a lot of sites and books about the benefit of veggies and problem of too much meat consumption. Just Google them.

Quality of food is important, but quantity matters as well. Don’t eat too much. If you want to have a healthy weight, don’t indulge till you get your stomach full. Instead, you should eat just enough to make you not hungry. We actually don’t need that much food to stay healthy. Gluttony is actually one of the seven deadly sins.

Don’t do drugs unless your doctor told you so. Health supplements should only be used if you can’t get from natural foods in your few courses of meal everyday. Basically, we shouldn’t take any pills if we can eat healthily.

Besides drugs, other ‘sinful’ products like coffee and alcohols should only be taken modestly. Both coffee and alcohols do have health benefits in certain circumstances. We should only eat or drink things that are good to our body. Therefore, tobacco is no-no. It is a waste of money and bad to our health. Teas are ok, especially green teas.

If you study science, particularly biology and chemistry, you will understand what foods can be broken down into what chemicals as well as how those chemicals benefit our health. Therefore, it will help you to look beyond the fancy stuff about cooking and ingredients to understand that, at the end of the day (in your stomach and going through your intestines), what they will end up to be. It can give you a more fundamental perspective of the function and value of foods. So, you will be less likely fooled by the advertisers and companies on promoting things to make money off you.

Be careful of false advertisements of foods/drugs/health supplements. Many of them are deceptive.

Don’t over spend on foods. In a normal society, foods shouldn’t be cost too much. Live with basic should be good enough. Therefore, try to avoid consumption of exotic foods. That’s neither good to our earth nor our wallet. They serve basically no additional health benefit to us as well if you know the biology and chemistry stuff. There are always equally good equivalent foods in terms of nutrients out there that are more abundant and cheaper.

Only eat modestly. Foods are for their nutrient value, good tasting is a plus, but not the other way around. Not feeling hungry is a virtue. Feeling too full is not necessary a blessing.