When Eating Healthy Isn't So Healthy

I had chicken soup the other day. Good homemade chicken soup. To the average American, this would seem like a healthy meal. Yet, it wasn't. But what could be wrong with homemade chicken soup??

Let's look at the ingredients:

Carrots, potatoes: These were both extensively peeled.

Boneless, skinless chicken breasts: This is the white bread of the meat world. Its stripped of everything that is good. Granted, I can understand why people would want to avoid the fat from meats raised in a factory conditions. The way the animals are raised yields a more unhealthy meat, high on the negative fats, low on the good ones. Still, the only way to make decent chicken broth is by using everything. Boiling a whole chicken--skin, bones, marrow, organs, meats and all--brings all of that rich goodness into the broth. I recommend pasture-raised chickens.

Noodles: These were made from white flour. This is bleached and striped of the germ and bran sections of the grain, which are the most nutrient dense. I found a chart that suggests that white flour may be missing 2/3 of the nutrition it had as a whole grain.

Since these ingredients could not yield a flavorful soup, canned broth was added. This is almost always loaded with MSG and doesn't have the same gelatinous properties of homemade broth (most likely due to have a concentrated chicken flavoring but less actual substance from the chicken). Real chicken broth is a greasy, murky solution that turns almost to a solid gel when cooled. That's when you know it has all the good stuff in it!

Recent research into nutrition is suggesting that eating whole foods is the better way to go. Our society processes foods and strips out essential components. Many vitamins loose the structures that deliver that nutrition to your body. Our diet becomes calorie-heavy, but sparse on nutrients. In their natural, whole state, foods provide balanced nutrition, but when we start messing around with it by favoring certain parts and removing others, we mess with the delicate balance that we have evolved to eat.

In light of the whole foods approach to eating, much of what we think is healthy need to be re-evaluated.

Would your recent meal pass the whole foods test?