Should I Eat This? A Guide To Food In The 21st Century

Ever caught yourself staring blankly at the back of a food package, unable to tell whether eating it will fill you with goodness or kill you? Have you ever heard the jingle for a food item and suddenly started craving that food? Ever stood staring blankly in the grocery aisle, mesmerized by all the choice?

You’re not alone.

For those of us lucky enough to have that dizzying array of choices, deciding what to eat (and what to avoid) can be a mind-bending experience.

Eating Should Be Easy, But It’s Not
One second fat is the enemy. The next minute it’s carbs that’ll kill. And then before you know it, only bad carbs are bad, good carbs are cool.

Should you follow the Paleo diet or eat based on your blood type? Should you avoid all animal products or pump up the protein? Does milk really do a body good? What about pork, the other white meat? Where’s the beef?

Is this going to make me fat? Will it give me diabetes, a heart attack, or cancer? Is it full of GMOs (and what the hell’s a GMO anyway)? What weird chemicals does it contain? How many Weight Watchers points is that?

AARGH!

It’s enough to drive a person around the bend and back again.

But wait, there’s more.

Eating Right Isn’t Just About Health Anymore
In recent years, we’ve started paying more attention to where our food comes from. Who makes it and how? Is the process of producing our food destroying our earth, poisoning the air and water? How does what we eat affect people halfway across the globe?

As much as we’d like our food decisions to be based on logic and science, they’re usually based on marketing, peer pressure, culture, and conjecture.

There are a million voices (from your Mom to multi-million dollar marketing campaigns to me) all clamoring for you to eat what they say you should eat.

Food shouldn’t be that hard; it doesn’t have to be.

You could choose to just turn your head and look the other way. You could choose to blindly follow the latest diet trend. You could choose to take your chances, hurting your health and the people around you along the way.

Or, you could learn a little more and decide for yourself.

Should I Eat This: The Blog Series
In this series I’m going to explore the different types of food we eat: candy bars and snack food; fast food and gourmet restaurant meals; meat, fish, and tofu; grains, veggies, and lots of other tasty stuff.

I want to find out how each of these foods affects our health and what it’s doing to the world around us.

I’m not going to make up rules and ban dessert and count calories and weigh out grams of fat. That’s boring. I’m not going to preach about what to eat and what to avoid. That’s your decision. I will share the conclusions I’ve drawn for myself and you can do with them what you like.

By the end of the series, I hope to arm us all with enough information so we can pick up any food item at any time and answer one key question:

Should I Eat This?

Should I Eat This? Part One will be coming your way mid-March.

The Fine Print
Disclaimer 1: I am not a doctor, nutritionist or any other kind of health professional. I’m just an avid cook and food nut who hates to see people struggle with health and happiness just because they don’t know what to eat.

Disclaimer 2: I’m not going to cover every aspect of every issue of eating in this guide. If I did, it would be akin to reading the dictionary or the bible cover to cover – and no one wants to do that. The information in this guide represents what I think is interesting and useful and I hope you will too.

Should I Eat This? The Complete Series

• Should I Eat This? A Guide To Food In The 21st Century
  All about the series and why I feel compelled to write it.
• Should I Eat This? Part One: Fast Food
  Think you know everything there is to know about fast food? This might just surprise you.
• Should I Eat This? Part Two: Junk Food
  You know junk food is bad for you, right? You don’t know the whole story.
• Should I Eat This? Part Three: Fake Health Food
  Food companies lie to you every day. Here’s how to spot the fakes.
• Should I Eat This? Part 4.0: Meat & The Environment
  Meat isn’t just about animal welfare. It’s people welfare, too.
• Should I Eat This? Part 4.1: Meat & Your Health
  Pesticides, painkillers, and slime? Can these really be ingredients in meat? And why does meat have ingredients anyway?
• Should I Eat This? Part 5: Fish
  What’s in a plate of sushi? And what does the military have to do with fishing?
• Should I Eat This? Part 6: Eggs & Dairy
  Cruelty and environmental destruction by the dozen.
  Should I Eat This? Part 7: Grains
  Finally, something you should totally eat. Possibly.
• Should I Eat This? Part 8: Fruits & Veggies
  Not only should you eat these, you should eat more.
• Should I Eat This? Cheat Sheet
  The quick and dirty guide to eating clean.
• Should I Eat This? The Flowchart
  A decision-making chart for those insoluble food conundrums.

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