For 2021, I decided to take on a year of health project rather than making New Years resolutions. While I have the best of intentions at the start of every year, my resolutions never seem to last for long.
The idea behind this experiment is to explore a new health topic for each month of the year. These topics could include anything from nutrition to stress management to exercise to social connections.
Each month I choose a nonfiction book to read in the first half. Then I try to implement what I’ve learned in the second half of the month.
So far this year I’ve read about cutting out sugar, relationships, and how nutrition affects our genes. In the second quarter, I learned about sleep, multipotentialites, and the connection between nature and health.
July Topic: Food Labels, Sources, and Security
The topic of food choices within the area of nutrition is one of my favorite health subjects to learn about. At the same time this topic can be incredibly overwhelming. There’s often so much conflicting information or the newest fad diets to wade through!
Also once you start digging into this subject, it can be so disheartening and discouraging to learn how the government fails us with outdated nutrition guidelines, policy loopholes and programs that harm more than they help. Once you know these things, you can’t unlearn them.
That puts the responsibility on yourself to make changes to your food choices and take control of your own health. The challenge can feel immense. It can feel impossible to know where to begin. It’s also normal to feel a lot of anger toward the current food system, the mistakes that have been made, and the continued hypocrisies without change.
The current food system, regulations, and guidelines have led to poor nutrition, the current epidemic of inflammatory diseases, and a complete disregard for the environment that we depend upon to sustain us. This journey into food information has made me realize I can be a willing consumer of bad practices. Or I can figure out how to make changes to put better food into my body and vote with my dollar to support practices in line with my values.
Beyond Labels: A Doctor and a Farmer Conquer Food Confusion One Bite at a Time was the book I’ve been searching for! It was the right choice at the right time for me. I love the encouragement, positivity, hope for the future, and sense of personal responsibility that both authors inspire with their mindset and words.
Review: Beyond Labels by Sina McCullough, PhD and Joel Salatin
Beyond Labels is co written by Sina McCullough, a doctor who healed her autoimmune disease through dietary changes over time and Joel Salatin, a regenerative farmer and head of the successful Polyface Farm in Virginia. The book explains various food labels and then seeks to go beyond that with discussion of food sources and ways to develop whatever food security means to the reader.
The format of the book flows like a discussion between the two of authors as they share information, insights, and tips for finding good food as well as preparing it. Both remain incredibly positive and hopeful in tone. Even though Sina has dealt with a lot of anger at the government regulations of the current food system that made her very sick. For his part, Joel is disgusted with most government agencies and the often ridiculous regulations that tie small farmer’s hands and deny people access to healthy foods.
Beyond Labels begins with exercises to identify your personal roadmap to health, happiness, and freedom. The authors emphasis meeting yourself wherever you are on their food independence scale. Then making small changes over a long time to reach the right goal for yourself. For some that means choosing better foods from the grocery store. To others it means purchasing food from local farms. Wherever you are, they focus on being an informed consumer and taking on the responsibility for your own food choices.
The book contains 72 practical bites to get you started with small changes. These are organized in sections that begin with shifting to high quality processed food, then to whole foods from the store, to locally grown whole foods, and finally to growing your own. I found all of these practical bites to be very useful, informative, and easy to understand.
Some Interesting Takeaways:
- Being consistent with food changes is more important than being perfect.
- Joel shares a favorite experiment he witnessed on a school farm with a worm box. Students brought in processed foods like cookies and candies to give the worms. The teacher supplied produce scraps. The next week, the students’ contributions were still sitting there but the teacher’s were all gone – digested by the worms.
- It’s important to follow the money trail before you decide what experts and studies to trust. Often food and agriculture studies even at universities are funded by corporations with a direct link to the products being tested. Throughout the book there are numerous examples of biased studies where products that we now know cause harm made it to consumption like aspartame and crisco. Many remain on the market.
- We know that not all calories are created equal. Some are more nutritionally dense than others. There are also issues with the way calories are measured, in a bomb calorimeter which only measure one isolated reaction. Our ability to digest food is influenced by many things like our gut health and composition, the timing of our previous meal, how the different foods interact, and even how many times you chew.
- The EWG does not include glyphosate testing in their analysis lists for the dirty dozen and clean fifteen.
- During EWG testing in 2018, they found 40% of all non organic spinach samples contained DDT. DDT is technically banned in the U.S. but still in use through a loophole allowing it if it’s an ingredient but not the final product!
- Most soil in the US is 1 percent carbon or less. Over the past 50 years, Polyface Farm has raised their soil carbon to just over 8% with regenerative practices like steady composting and good grazing management.
Quotes from Beyond Labels:
Final Verdict:
I loved this book! Toward the end of it, I knew I’d like to buy a bunch of copies to give to each of my loved ones.
The tone of the book is very open, inviting, and conversational with no judgements on the reader. There’s a strong emphasis on meeting yourself wherever you are and taking your time to make the changes that are right for you.
I enjoyed the way the authors present their points as a discussion. The way they use humor to admit their own biases was refreshing. When one goes on a rant – because much of this broken system is incredibly frustrating – they come back to the conversation with a positive outlook for the future sharing actions consumers can take to encourage better practices.
I’m on the more extreme end of working toward one day growing and raising most of our own food. Beyond Labels would appeal even more to those wanting to make better decisions in the grocery store. That’s actually the largest section of the book with many practical bites!
The practical bites are fantastic with manageable changes to make and solid reasoning behind their conclusions. I really appreciated the way they break down massive policies and studies into clear concise points. They offer numerous findings and cases to back up their conclusions without bogging the reader down in a sea of confusing statistics.
Beyond Labels is the best guide I’ve read for understanding all the different labels we can find on our food nowadays and knowing what those truly signify. Because there are so many, grocery shopping can get complicated. Especially if you have to pick and choose between labels because a product doesn’t have them all. Joel and Sina help you identify where to start.
Book Pick for August
My year of health topic for August focuses on exercise. I chose to read The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection and Courage by Kelly McGonigal, PhD. The book focuses on falling in love with movement instead of all the reasons why we should exercise. McGonigal shows how movement can be a source of joy rather than feel like a chore.
Her writing uses a blend of science and narrative. She shares insights from a variety of fields like neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology combined with peoples’ personal accounts from all around the world of how they’ve found fulfillment through exercise. McGonigal investigates how movement can not only improve our health and mood but also be a form of self expression and social connection.
How do you use food labels to guide your choices? Where does your food come from?
