Читать книгу An Unfit Mother: How to get your Health, Shape and Sanity back after Childbirth - Kate Cook - Страница 59

I don’t really mean eat like an actual caveman—all those hairy mammoths and scurrying around looking under rocks for worms. Think of your nails, for a start. I do, however, mean the idea of eating real food that hasn’t been processed. Cavemen had to hunt for their food, fish for it, kill it, skin it, build a fire, cook on it. Or they had to grow it, wait a really long time and then harvest it, grind it up, cook it, mash it. What an adventure food must have been way back then.

Think how easy it is to get our hands on food now. We just have to head up the road to the local supermarket and fill the trolley. It is tempting to stack the trolley full of all sorts of ‘treats’ (after all, we have had a hard time at work and surely must deserve one of Mr Kipling’s ‘delicious’ cakes?). We may think that a Kipling’s cake will hit the spot, but our bodies disagree—they haven’t evolved much. In fact, our bodies’ reaction and requirement of food hasn’t changed since we were swinging through the trees, but our modern food has dramatically changed—and to think this has more or less happened in the last 40 years or so. Even when I was a kid in the Seventies there really wasn’t that much junk food—Frey Bentos Pies (delicious by the way, but I can’t think what can be in them), and peas and fish fingers. Oh, and Angel Delight. Sheer poison.

I am sure after the depravation of the war years, all this instant, cheap food must have seemed too good to be true. The truth is, it is too good to be true. Our bodies, although jolly clever, haven’t adapted to eating all the rubbish we throw at them. They are not used to eating the sweet, white and fluffy foods that most junk foods consist of—and everyone is scratching their heads trying to work out why the Western nations are turning into huge, lardy fatty-puffs—eating food that is not real food, that is how it’s happened. We have turned our bodies over to food scientists who want to prolong shelf life, or the advertisers who want to make money out of us. We are no longer making our own decisions. When you eat real food, it is really difficult to eat a highly calorific diet—vegetables, fruit, whole grains, fish and chicken and pulses are not naturally highly calorific and they are very filling. If you eat junk food, of course you have to count calories or pretty quickly you will massively exceed what you need to eat in a day.

In the West we may have all the calories we require, but do we have all the nutrients we need? We might even be malnourished (not enough vitamins and minerals). This rule is therefore about eating real food, food that you can recognise as food. Food that doesn’t have all sorts of words on the label beginning with ‘x’ and are more than three syllables. Food that smells like food. Generally also food that can be cooked and made into something—rather than food that is already something as soon as you get it home from the shops. A drag it may be, but otherwise you will pay for it.