Who are restaurants fooling?
This little article is not directly about our whole food supplements, except to say that there is a GREAT need for them, given the quality of foods served in most restaurants. And most people are eating at restaurants in droves these days.
Unless you are exceptionally fortunate, it’s rare to be served healthful foods in most restaurants. And it’s en vogue to serve up a lot of hype and nonsense. We can begin with the word “fresh.” Restaurant websites like to tell you that their foods are fresh. What does this really mean? Very little. You would hope the food you’re eating is fresh, wouldn’t you? So how is this a novel idea?
Fresh ingredients say nothing about whether they are full of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, artificial ingredients, and bad fats and oils. Fresh is better than frozen and microwaved, which is what you get from the big chains like Chili’s, Applebees, the infamous Cheesecake Factory, and their ilk.
Similarly, “natural” ingredients offer the same empty promises. One of our fellow practitioners, the brilliantly gifted nutritionist Josh Boughton, wrote an article about this years ago, explaining that the word natural “natural” carries no weight at all and speaks neither to good quality nor a lack of artificial ingredients. Natural means very little indeed.
Leslie Nemo, a food writer, provided this insight regarding “natural” ingredients on the bonapetit.com website:
In 2015, about 60 percent of surveyed consumers thought packaged foods labeled ‘natural’ were made with no toxic pesticides, no artificial colors or ingredients, and no GMOs. Between 80 and 85 percent of them thought that ‘natural’ should indicate each of those three things. So far, foods made with GMOs, high-fructose corn syrup, and artificial preservatives or coloring struggle the most to keep the [natural] term In 2013, foods with ‘natural’ on the label made up $40.7 billion in sales, and a 2016 Consumer Reports survey says we’re even more likely to buy natural over organic.
Next, there is the idea of what people consider healthful and how restaurants exploit their lack of knowledge. What constitutes healthful food? Most people seem to know that McDonald’s is not a place for good quality food that feeds your body what it needs, but they eat there anyway for taste, price, and convenience – none of which has to do with keeping you alive and healthy. But more than this, there is a great grey area when it comes to what you eat in even more “respectable” establishments.
If you’ve ever watched Chef Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares you may have even been scared off of eating at restaurants for the rest of your life – rodent- and grease-infested kitchens, improperly stored and rotting food, and ingredients you’d never purchase yourself from any grocery store. So what the heck are you eating when you go to a restaurant? The answer: It’s anybody’s guess unless you know the owners and have taken a personal tour of the kitchen and equipment. Restaurants cause more sickness and food poisoning than we will ever know, because most cases are not reported.
Now that this rant is over, you can see why people need whole food supplements – BECAUSE they are definitely not getting nutrients from restaurant food. And with the way our economy is going, eating out is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. In the least, it’s best to offer this schedule to nearly everyone you see in your healthcare practice to give people the nutrients they desperately need:
Green Nutrients (green vegetables): 6-8 tablets a day
BFood: 6 tablets a day
CaroC: 6 tablets a day