All SKUs are Unnatural

Hunt and Gather Nutrients

Eating like our ancestors ain’t easy.

I like the Paleo Diet concept - Eat like our ancestors to avoid modern, metabolic, diet-related diseases.

Eat whole foods - meat, veggies, and fruit - and chomp your way to fitness. There is a lot to be said for this approach.

All of us think of orange chips, red candy, and pink icing donuts as unnatural. These so called “foods” would baffle our hunter-gatherer ancestors. So would the more natural SKUs in a grocery store:

• Broccoli was developed from Kale in the 1500’s.

• Grapes, oranges, and bananas are seedless(sterile) and bigger than their wild ancestor fruits.

• The 150-year-old Red Delicious apple variety has been selected to be big, sturdy, and have a long shelf life. A solid fruit that takes weeks to rot is a modern miracle allowing them to be shipped from the US all over the world.

• Meat is sliced and packaged and nutrient-rich organ meats are shunned by consumers.

• Fruit juices are liquid sugar that became available and popular in the last 100 years.

True nutrition - food with a high density and variety of micronutrients - is hard to find in the store. You have to hunt for them and gather them in your cart. Unfortunately - nutrition is not as simple as reading the ingredient list and table on a package.

Micronutrients are destroyed by every process in processing food - heating, refining, bleaching, adding chemicals for shelf life, color, flavor, and taste-feel, and time itself. Real food rots.

Micronutrients are best absorbed from their natural forms, not as Franken-vitamins sprinkled on breakfast cereal. Micronutrient absorption is affected by nutrient interactions, many of which we do not understand.

Micronutrient density and variety come from the conditions a plant was grown and an animal was raised. Poor soil and poor diet inputs lead to poor nutrition outcomes.

The rose problem - Roses have been selected for beauty and durability, as a result, their fragrance has declined. Nutrient density and variety has been decreasing. Nutrition is not a priority for farmers, distributors, and most consumers. If you select a vegetable for quick growth, hardiness, and consumer attractiveness, nutrients are bound to decrease as it is being ignored.

The hunt for nutrients is critical for life. Hunger is not all about calories. You can be fat and full of food, yet undernourished and hungry if the food you eat does not have the nutrients you need.

The hunt for nutrients is hard. It would take a lab to analyze if a specific broccoli crown is high or low on the normal nutrient range of broccoli. It takes DNA testing to make sure that a fish is actually the promised species. The term “Natural” means almost nothing on a food label besides how the marketeers are positioning the product to appeal to consumers.

How natural is a food? Where does it come from? How was it grown or raised? These are getting fit advanced issues. They add a lot of confusion as they are debated constantly by health coaches, nutritionists, and social media food and diet influencers.

For the average American, these advanced issues do not matter. EVOO fraud, chicken access to an outdoor “yard,” and Idaho potato soil quality are not top issues. If a guy is eating a fried chicken sandwich, french fries, and soda every other day for lunch - he needs to address the flood of sugar and fry oil first. They are high in calories, obesity-inducing, and low in nutrients.

Every SKU is unnatural so select the ones the are the most natural-ish. The SKUs without ingredient labels - whole foods - meats, veggies, and fruits.