Forget Complicated Food Rules: This Is The Most Important One Hands Down

What does that mean? Real food is food that is in its original form or is as close to that as humanly possible. These are foods that are not processed, are rich in nutrients, and are free of additives.

Whole fruits and veggies are the first things that spring to mind when we talk about real food because they are most recognizably in their natural form. Things get a little trickier when you move on down the line to grains, meat, and dairy, all of which can show up on the grocery store shelf either minimally processed or highly processed.

Things like high-fructose corn syrup and trans fats are two highly publicized examples. When we think of highly processed foods, we think of McDonald's, KFC, or food you might buy at the gas station. But do most people think about yogurt, pasta, or even oatmeal as being processed?

But as real-food visionary and endocrinologist Robert Lustig, M.D., says, "It's not what's in the food—it's what's been done to the food that counts." In other words, people get a little too hung up on whether it's sugar or fat or salt that we should be avoiding in our food and forget to look at the other dimensions of what's on our plate.

Many of these highly processed foods can even be labeled organic because you don't need pesticides to develop compounds in a lab. Likewise, many of these chemical additives are derived from plants, which gives the food industry legal cover to call them "natural." Even more alarming, as the term plant-based has gained popularity, brands are scrambling to put that qualifier on everything from crackers to fake meat.

We began a long, expensive, disastrous experiment with our food that included tinkering, adding, subtracting, and shuffling around key components of whole foods. Whether it's genetically modifying food or enriching it, we have fundamentally changed the food supply, and as a result, the food supply has changed us. As U.S. corporations were experimenting with how to make food more profitable and palatable and easier to produce, they were also playing with our long-​term health by testing the impacts of their new inventions only on our short-term health. If they tested a new modified starch on a bunch of rats and they didn't immediately die (or die within six weeks), that was considered good enough. But no one studied the long-​term metabolic effects of all this tinkering with the food supply.

In fact, it's good for us from a calories‑in, calories-out perspective—what our body doesn't know won't hurt it, right? Unfortunately, that couldn't be more wrong. It matters where our calories come from. The fundamental miscalculation that the U.S. made in the 1940s when it decided to start enriching food is the same one we make today when we continue to eat those highly processed foods. We underestimate the profound complexity and intelligence of the human body. Your metabolism is nobody's fool, but if you treat it like one, you will see a range of unintended downstream health consequences.

There is so much we don't know about the impact of all the additives we are putting in our food. The food industrial complex is not interested in funding that kind of research, and the amount of research scientists can do is far outstripped by the breakneck speed of food technology. But what we do know is more than enough to have you shopping the perimeter of the grocery store forever.