Exactly how real is our food?

Jayna has been doing a lot of research on the food we eat and what goes into it, and from what she's told me, it's pretty scary/nasty/toxic/evil.  It's really weird how much the food we eat (and the chemicals therein) can affect us.  It's not even just the issue of gaining weight--bad foods can cause digestive issues, hormone imbalances and even so far as causing depression and affecting our moods in other ways (please don't tell me that my issues with my temper are caused by my delicious red meat!)  We can't really even go so far as to say that certain food groups are to blame, or that we're taking in too much cholesterol or eating too many donuts.  Well, maybe eating too many donuts is a problem, but that's a blog entry for another day.  It's the chemicals that are used in the foods we eat--the preservatives, the vitamin 'fortifications,' the artificial sweeteners, and even the vegetable-y oils used.  So, we're trying to go on a 'real food' diet.  This means that we're trying to rid our home of artificial ingredients and over processed food products.  It also means we'll be doing a lot more cooking.  And label reading.  And food experimenting.

A lot of the resources Jayna's been reading with regards to the real food diets talk a lot about fermentation.  This isn't the moonshine variety of fermentation, though--although the thought has crossed my mind--this is the kind of fermentation that takes ordinary-sounding foods and makes them healthier.  Kombucha, for example:  it's fermented tea.  We still use the same tea bags that my iced tea machine uses, but we use a different process that adds a whole bunch of things that are good for digestion.  All the beneficial little buggers in yogurt are now in an easily drinkable form, so we don't actually have to eat loads of yogurt--it gets tiresome after a while--to get all the active cultures and probiotics to replenish the bacteria in our stomachs.  I'm not so sure about the other types of fermentation (lacto-fermentation in particular) by which we could make our own condiments, though, because it just kind of weirds me out.

We're also looking into farm co-ops for fresh fruits and veggies, as well as meat, milk and eggs.  I know it sounds a little hippie for us to pay a farm for free range, grass-fed pork, beef, chicken, milk and eggs, but there's a lot of research that shows eating the stuff from the grocery store is more than incredibly unhealthy. Most of the packaged meat purchased from your every day--walmart/kroger--grocery store comes from farms where the animals are regularly injected with growth hormones and antibiotics, whether they need the antibiotics or not.  The hormones, obviously, are to make the animals grow as big as possible in order to yield a higher quantity of marketable meat, but those hormones stay in the meat all the way to your dinner plate.  The same goes for the stuff in what is actually fed to the animals--and who even knows what they're fed!

While I'm a bit reluctant to eat some of the stuff we're starting to eat, I'm trying to keep an open mind about it all and be adventurous, especially since all of it is really good for me.  One of the first steps we took was to start reading the ingredients on food packages--if I can't pronounce it, I'm not buying it.  Words to live by, if ever I've heard any.