After years of “functional food” being popular – people are rightly becoming increasingly skeptical of food being designed by scientists to be healthy.  More and more evidence is coming out supporting the idea that the body is incredibly sophisticated at picking out nutrients and vitamins.  No longer is a vitamin pill equal to an apple – in fact, the human body is specifically designed to absorb the vitamins from whole food, rather than from the isolates that are stuck together with additives and flavors.  Evolution has ensured that the thousands of years of people eating whole food grown in nature has trained the body appropriately.  It’s becoming clear that not all vitamins, fiber, and protein is the same.  All those years scientists wasted extracting and isolating the very best parts of fiber from the grain and the protein from soy, and spraying food with vitamins.

Here comes the real food revolution.  Well, sort of.

In response to the trend of consumers demanding real food – food scientists and marketers have responded by making food real again!  Are you skeptical?  You should be.

Expect more food with long shelf lives that is marketed as simple, wholesome, and real.  We’re already seeing aseptic looking white packaging with Helvetica font featuring once big branded food that is now “simple”.  Foods are being reformulated to remove High Fructose Corn Syrup, substituted with something called evaporated cane juice – which sounds a lot more real than sugar, which is what it is.  Products are being fairy dusted with whole wheat flour, or something called wheat flour, which is actually just white flour.  Natural flavors which are scientific concoctions barely understandable by the people that make them, are flavoring our foods – instead of the ingredients themselves.  Pictures of farmers are shown in commercials growing things like potatoes and vegetables – clearly leaving out pictures of the corporate offices and lobbyists doing most of the work.  More and more growth is coming from organic – yet, quite a bit of those products are being imported from places with different organic standards than the United States.  People are fighting for GMO labeling, yet the government insists that there is no difference between genetically modified and “real”.  Meat is being reformulated to remove pink slime, yet the antibiotics and corn pellet diets remain.  Farmed salmon is injected with dye to give it its “real” pink color.

Call it the real food revolution.

Or just realwashing.

Be well!

Daniel

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