Eating "Green"

Do you have any kids in your family who you only see every few months? When you meet that niece, nephew or cousin you can't believe how big they've gotten. When you only see something once in a while, the changes they make become more dramatic.

I have a similar relationship with the United States, which I visit once a year or less. Over the past decade I've been watching as the country has gotten more and more health conscious while simultaneously getting fatter and sicker.

I've discussed before the idea of the "health potato," someone who wants to be a well person but is unwillingly to make any serious changes to their lifestyle to get there. In my infrequent trips back to America I've seen how marketers are evolving their products to target this growing demographic.

This last trip I was struck by the amount of things that hinted of their natural green organic goodness. All the products look like they're getting ready for St. Patrick's day, decked out with wholesome green logos, green packaging, and the word "organic" anywhere they can squeeze it in.

On this blog I go on and on about eating vegetables and fruit. And so do all the people giving good advice on living well out there. But, as this post will show you, a product made from vegetables and labeled as organic is not a vegetable and will not further your health goals. So grab a cart and come on a quick trip to the local American supermarket with me.

(For all of these products, I'm going to assume you are a normal person who eats say, a can of soup, or, a complete pack of spices, as they were obviously intended to be eaten, despite the manufacturers breaking them into tricky serving sizes.)

Item 1: AriZona Green Tea
This product has been driving me nuts since it's introduction in the late 90s. I was so stoked to see green tea showing up on the shelves of US supermarkets as a teenager back then. A pretty cherry blossom design and some kanji, along with the magic words "100% All Natural Tea" make it seem like you're about to get something healthy in your system. But one sip will tell you this is nothing like the 0 calorie, antioxidant rich green tea of Japan. What a syrupy mess!

Let's turn the can around and see what's going on here.
How many calories are in this sucker? 70!? Oh wait, that's for 8 fl oz. The bottle contains three servings, so this is a 210 calorie drink. Where are all those calories coming from? Well, it was cropped in the picture, but the second ingredient after "green tea" is our old friend High Fructose Corn Syrup. 210 calories in what is traditionally a 0 calorie drink! If you'd like to see some good examples of what 200 calories looks like, check out this page of photos of 200 calories of different foods.

But it's not the calories that bug me, it's the fact that most people choosing AriZona green tea probably think they're making a better choice than a soda. In fact this nasty little drink is just a coca-cola in a kimono.

Item 2 : Veggie Cream Cheese
This spread has both "garden vegetables" and "natural flavors". And a happy cartoon cow! Seems healthy enough.

Alas, cream cheese is still cream cheese. One of the highest concentrations of fat of any of the cheeses. I don't have a problem with fat, it's an important part of a balanced diet. But spreading on two servings of this on either side of a nutritionally empty bagel will eat up 60% of your recommended saturated fat for the day with no positive gains in the nutrients you need to be well. Go with a light cream cheese and (gasp!) actual vegetables on your bagel and you'll be a lot better off.

Now, before I get into the next few items, we need to get our facts straight on sodium. The US recommended daily allowance of salt is no more than 2400 mg a day. I'm not sure what calculations went into this number, but it is INSANELY high. The American Heart Association goes with a number around 1500 mg, which I also find high. These recommended numbers don't really matter since the average American eats between 4000 and 5000 mg of salt a day. An excess of salt in your diet causes your body to retain water in the blood vessels, increasing blood pressure and bloats your skin, making you look red and puffy (i.e, like an average American). Chronic overdoses of salt will strip your gears as your kidneys try to keep up processing it, and you will see some nasty diseases when it catches up to you in your 50s and 60s.

The body needs 500 mg of salt to function normally. That's all our ancestors ever got. But I'll give us some wiggle room and knock it up to 1000 mg. That's the Patrick Reynolds RDA. When I get people to cut the salt, they look and feel so much better, and the natural flavors of foods become available to the tongue. So, when we're looking at the salt content of these foods, remember we are looking at a number based on the US RDA, one that is more than double what someone trying to be truly healthy would be looking at (the PR RDA of 1000 mg).

Hope that all made sense. Onwards!

Item 3 : Amy's Vegetable Lasagna
Finally! An alternative to all those unhealthy microwave dinners! This box is absolutely bursting with wellness buzzwords. Organic pasta and vegetables! No GMO's! And it's made by a girl named Amy! How could someone named Amy not make something wholesome! Let's look at the side of the package.
Ouch, nearly a third of your days salt in this little box. If you were going for true conditioning this would be just about all your salt for the day. But at least it's organic sodium stripping your kidneys down to nubs!

Item 4 : Green Giant Broccoli and Cheese Sauce
A classic brand, a classic combo. Maybe with the cheese the kids will eat their broccoli...
So we check the label, and the salt comes in at 19% Not bad right? Until we see that the box contains 2 and 1/2 servings, meaning the real total is 46% of the US RDA. If you were eating on my terms, this box of broccoli and cheese would be all the salt for your day, all in a lame side dish from the freezer section.

Item 5 : Knorr Garlic & Herb Sauce Mix
We all know we should be cooking at home more, and these little spice packs seem to make the job easier. And look how green and wholesome it looks! But you guessed it...
Holy smokes! 3 servings at 33% each! Pour this sachet into your meal and you've gotten 99% of your US RDA, or 220% of my PR RDA. Even if you're eating with someone else, this is a mean little bundle of salt for one meal.

So, maybe we'd better go with the more "organicky" looking spice packs next to the Knorr section.

Item 6 : Simply Organic Southwest Taco Mix
Ah, simply organic, just what the doctor ordered! What could go wrong?
Look, only 16% US RDA of sodium! Much better than Knorr. But wait, they've divided this one up into 4 servings... so this is still a whopping 64% of your daily salt. And blows your PR RDA up in one meal. Simply Organic all the way to the Simply Call Me an Ambulance!

Item 7: Eating RIGHT Vegetable Soup

So you've heard me on the salt thing, and now you've got your eyes peeled for reduced sodium options. This soup is called Eating Right, and it has a green label so it must be better than the usual stuff. And check it out!
35% less sodium than the leading brand. Do we have a winner?
Ugh. 2 servings at 20% gets you 40% of your daily salt, or 100% of my RDA of daily salt. And this is the reduced sodium option! I was trying to be fair! Bottom line, don't eat canned soup. Eating RIGHT should really be called Eating ONLY SLIGHTLY BETTER THAN AWFUL.

Item 8 : Organics Organic Tomato Sauce
Alright, who could screw this one up. A green, happy can of organic tomatoes. Make your own sauces, soups, and stay in control of how much sodium goes in! Just in case, let's check the label.
9% sodium... not bad... but wait, they've divided it into 7 servings? Who the hell eats 1/7th of a can of tomatos? So we're really looking at 63% US RDA of salt in this innocent looking can of organic tomatoes. That's messed up dude!

I could go on aisle after aisle, but I think you get my point. I tried to pick the most healthy looking things on the shelves, the most organic and green looking packaging, and time and time again, they turn out to be quite poor options for anyone trying to be truly healthy.

And why? Because anything that is sold to you in a package has already lost its organic street cred. If you buy any of this stuff thinking it's better than the other packaged stuff on the shelves, you have only proven the power of marketing and graphic design. It only takes a few clicks of a mouse for someone to make a label green with the word organic on it. And they'll keep the pretty shades of green coming as long as there are health-potatoes out there who buy into it.

The real green foods don't need Adobe Illustrator to get their color. In fact, they don't need packaging at all.
Spend more time with these guys, and less with the type I've listed above, and you'll look and feel like the vibrant living being the labels are straining to imitate. And as PCPers know, if you're going for peak condition, then all of those things from the middle aisles of the supermarket are completely off the table.

More impressions of the health scene in the US coming soon!

The Psychology of Wellness - Part 1

This is the first of a three part series that will be coming out every other week.

As I discussed in the intro to this series, your mental states will be a key factor in how healthy you are. But most people go to work on everything but their minds. They buy protein powders, cross country skiing machines, read fitness articles, but never work on the mental conditioning that will give them sustainable, joyful wellness.

I'll teach you how to approach mental training in this series.

Part One - Seeing the Projector

What is it that's keeping you from being as healthy as you want to be? Every answer you give (not enough time, not enough motivation, etc...) will come back to one source. Your mind. You feel like you don't have enough time and energy to eat well and exercise because you spend too much time and energy listening to yourself say "I don't have enough time and energy."

That's about as clear as mud, so let's break it down.

Your brain is constantly sending electrical signals here there and everywhere. It's absolutely buzzing with energy. Think of it as an wet, fleshy, Tesla coil.

Most of these signals are for things we never notice, to keep our hearts beating, our lungs breathing, our stomachs digesting, etc... but a few of these signals, the ones flashing around the frontal lobe, come across to us as thoughts.
Thoughts are funny. You can only have one of them at a time. But they come one after another at such a furious pace that they become the background noise of your life. Something like a noisy air-conditioner that you eventually stop hearing entirely (until it's turned off).

Spend some time with kids and you'll see they breezily surf along their thoughts and the emotions they bring. But as we mature, we attain perhaps the greatest trick any lifeform has every pulled off. We get the ability to peek behind the curtain and say, "Would you look at that! I'm thinking!"

It's as if we were watching a movie in a theater for years and years, and finally one day turned around to see the projector's white beam. Suddenly, the hero's triumphs, the villain's wickedness, the ups and downs of the story are revealed to be just a projection.

This puts us in an interesting position. We have a thought and feel an emotion, but behind that there's a greater presence that knows we're simply having a thought and feeling an emotion. This can make some people queasy. There's a certain comfort in just bouncing along the thought stream as an idle passenger. This is in fact why we're so attracted to television and cinema. But living your whole life as driftwood in your consciousness won't get you far. The trouble with thoughts is that they're not particularly far-sighted. They react to what's immediately in front of them, and tend to latch on to the easiest seeming solution at the time.

I'm sure we all know that person who just never seems to get their life together. There are a lot of reasons for this, but most of them boil down to letting short term thoughts guide their choices. A lifetime of this kind of decision making will lead to some dark places.

So, what's the alternative?

To see your thoughts for what they truly are, impossibly brief flashes of electrical discharge inside your skull. A thought has only power when you buy into the story it's telling you.

Consider the difference between;

"I want to kill this guy"

and

"I'm thinking that I want to kill this guy"

I'd much rather be in a room with someone thinking the second sentence. The knowledge that a thought is just a thought gives you the freedom to make a different choice.

This clearly has a lot of meaning as we try to become healthier. Substitute "eat a piece of cake" for "kill this guy" and you'll start to see how powerful recognizing your thought patterns can be.

Sadly, it's not as easy as reading a blog post to really understand that thoughts are just thoughts. No matter how much you try to be aware, the unyielding flow of thinking will always suck you back in, unless you put in some training time. And that's where meditation comes in.

Meditation has been loaded with so many new age meanings that I hesitate to use it. A much more accurate phrase for the kind of meditation I'm prescribing is "structured time for passively watching your thought-stream." Doesn't exactly fit on a T-shirt.

Here's what you do. Find a comfortable seated position (we won't get into meditation cushions and lotus poses today) and quietly observe the random bursts of thoughts that flicker through your frontal lobe.

Within a minute all kinds of thoughts will start to spin off at a dizzying pace. Some of them will say this is a waste of time. Some of them will note how silly this is. Some of them will be outright hostile to the exercise. That's fine. Just watch.

You might have a thought that says, "Oh, I need to send that email" but don't you dare start to move towards the keyboard. That's not what this time is for. To do that would be to slip back into the thought-stream. Just as you wouldn't stop a workout at the gym to go send an email, you don't stop your mental training on a whim.

Do this for 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes. It won't be easy or fun. You might feel like you're going crazy. You'll think of things you haven't thought of in years. You'll dream up conspiracies, you'll plan world domination, you'll worry for your loved ones and you'll loathe yourself. Relax. They're just thoughts.

And that's how meditation works. Through repeated exposure to the "raw feed" of your thoughts, you learn to take them less seriously. You get used to dismissing them as the chatter of a healthy, active mind. And you can start to explore what you really want to do with your short time on the planet.

I know that there are a great, great many of you who will read this, understand it, agree with it, and still not meditate. Know that you are fooling yourself if you think intellectual knowledge equals real understanding. This is the equivalent of reading health magazines about how to get "amazing six pack abs" and never doing a sit-up. Practice is the only way.

Try the super basic meditation I've layed out here for the next few weeks, and check back in for the second part of this series, where we'll talk about dealing with negative thoughts. You must go through this first step though, because you'll never be able to deal with thoughts at all if you don't see them for the flimsy things they are!

Tell me how it goes in the comments!