Be picky! 4 Simple food-selection tips

As a former cheese-fry eating contest champion and probable record holder for most Lafayette Coney orders in single week, I certainly know what bad food tastes like. I lived it, man. For example, I promise you the following Taco Bell drive-thru order actually took place in my younger days. I still have friends that bring it up as legend over beers back home…

“I’ll take a nachos bell grande please, no tomatoes, no onions, but extra cheese. And I mean extra. I’ll pay for double or triple extra or whatever you feel up to charging me. I want it gross, man. Have fun with it.”

I think I got fatter just remembering that order… haha! When the guy came to the window, he was laughing. You could tell he felt guilty handing it to me, he said something about not being able to tell what was below the cheese as my friends and I all stared in awe at the plastic trough in front of me.

And I’m sure I used whatever spork or foon they put in the bag to get every last drop of that cheese. That, my friends, is how Old Trau rolled.

But as this blog is evidence of, those days are far behind me. These days I wouldn’t even be comfortable if some of that cheese sauce touched my skin, much less made it into my digestive tract.

Since giving up my Old Trau ways, I’ve become keenly observant of the awful, horrible things the good people around me consume on a regular basis. Some of it is blatantly bad for them, some is masked in healthy-looking packaging.

One of the most crucial elements of a healthy body is a picky, skeptical sense of appetite. I’ve come across some solid, no-bullshit guidelines that I think are a good starting point to help the person a bit stymied  by all the “healthy” food out there make better choices.

Suspicious Package Rule:
If it comes in a box, wrapper, can or bag, be skeptical. Don’t immediately discard it, but processed, chemical-laden foods come in packages. That’s how they roll. And if it has a package, it has nutrition facts. Read up. Focus on the ingredients more than the percentages. Some great foods come in packages, so I will emphasize that the point is to be skeptical, not dismissive. Only dismiss once you’ve considered the following rules…

Dawn’s Classic “Rule of Thumb”
Now I don’t know if my friend Dawn invented this herself, but she introduced it to me, so it’s hers as far as I’m concerned. The rule: On any packaging that lists nutrition facts, if you can lay your thumb horizontally over the ingredients list and still read some of the ingredients, that’s a bad sign. Read the list now. Granted, it could be something like a trail mix where the long list of ingredients are all whole foods and totally welcome in your belly… but is there anything in there you can’t pronounce? Let’s move on to the third rule…

Pronunciation vs. Digestion rule
So you’re reading an ingredients list, everything looks good for the first three, then you get to some collection of consonants and vowels that resembles a word… You’ve just stumbled upon a chemical. A sweetener, a thickener, a preservative. Sure, the good people at Whatever Co. deemed it safe enough to go into a food product, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for you by a long shot. If you can’t pronounce it, who’s to say you can digest it?

Piece-by-piece rule
When you’re trying to cook up an alibi for the unpronounceable item in your packaged food, consider this: If all the ingredients in that list were separated and laid out on the counter in front of you, would you be comfortable taking an equal spoonful of each into your mouth? A heaping bite of partially hyrdogenated cottonseed oil perhaps? A shot of sodium pyrophosphate anyone? Hell no. If you wouldn’t eat it alone, or even stir it into a home-cooked recipe, don’t let those bastards at Whatever Co. slip it into your mouth either.

It takes a little practice to make all of these things habit, and maybe a bit more scrutiny than some folks can afford to devote to their diets. But for me, what I put into my mouth gets as much scrutiny — if not more — as anything I would be trying to put into any other orifice in my body. These tips aren’t guaranteed to make everything you purchase a healthy product, they are merely guidelines put into practice by an increasingly educated, recovering cheese-sauce-aholic.

So… how will you treat YOUR orifice today?

TRAU

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