Thought Press.

I’ve been making an effort to eat healthier. It doesn’t take too much effort to do so. One main step is planning ahead. Meals Matter is a great site that makes meal planning easy. You can find recipes, make shopping lists, and even get a personalized nutritional assessment. I’ve added some new healthy foods to my shopping list like beans/lenitls, more yogurt, fish, and peaches. I find that planning my meals days ahead of time makes me focus on well balanced meals.

Take a look at the government food pyramid. It’s tough job trying to have the right daily intake of foods. 3 cups of vegetables every day. 2 cups of fruit! 8 ounces of grains. It’s a lot if you think about it. And not just vegetables. You need to aim for dark green vegetables, orange vegetables, starchy vegetables… It goes on. Make it simpler by downloading a convenient food diary where you can easily mark off what you’ve had each day.

Now what about organic foods? Marketplace had an interview with the CEO of Whole Foods. He was saying that in the US we spend about 8 percent of our income on food but in Europe and Japan they spend 15 to 20 percent. And, you’ll see they have much higher quality food that we do in the US.

“Americans make a tradeoff; we trade off less expensive food and it’s not as good and we’re also if you look around we’re suffering an obesity crisis in the United States; we eat a lot of crappy food in the United States.” - John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods

I am contemplating a couple weeks or a month of only buying from Whole Foods just to see if I feel better about what I eat. It’s a good experiment.