Carbohydrate Dense Foods (CDF's)

What exactly are CDF's? 

A stroll through a modern American supermarket reveals a cornucopia of products which, from an evolutionary standpoint, constitute brand new forms of food.  These products have been manufactured very carefully to provide high levels of eating pleasure but are packed with sugar calories.  Many of these foods do not taste sweet, which can be confusing to people whose work and education do not include an in-depth knowledge of food biochemistry.  These foods are quite literally being tested on us, the consumers, and while an underfunded Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is doing its best to protect us, the food industry has been extremely successful in bringing to market hundreds of common items which have not been properly vetted for the long-term health and safety of consumers.  In the context of two thousand millennia of human evolution, instant oatmeal, multigrain cereals, muffins, trail mix, and fruit juices are all brand new additions to our food supply.  Marketed as healthy food options, these CDFs are in fact the occult drivers of illness.  A Big Gulp did not exist one hundred years ago.  Nor did cheese puffs, protein bars, or fast food restaurants selling bread made from genetically modified (GMO) wheat, meats from unhealthy animals treated with hormones and antibiotics, and drinks loaded with more sugar than humans for two million years might typically have consumed in a week.  

Such products are exceedingly easy to mass produce and they yield high profits for BIg Food manufacturers.  What makes it worse is that they are literally designed by food scientists to push pleasure buttons in our brains making them particularly enjoyable and even addicting to consumers.  Big Food has heavily marketed CDFs, linking their consumption psychologically with celebration, fun, happiness, and family.  What would a summer barbecue be without hot dogs, hamburgers, and soft drinks?  What would a birthday party be without cake?  For that matter, what would breakfast be without toast?  At Thanksgiving we eat stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweetened cranberry sauce, and pies.  We celebrate Easter with chocolates, Christmas with candy canes and gingerbread cookies, and passover with matzah.  CDFs have been marketed as integral components of our national identity and our daily lives.  One can chart the expansion of CDFs into the TAD alongside the incidence of obesity and chronic diseases and see a nearly perfect parallel.  For two million years we lived on the Human Diet.  Over the last 50-60 years that diet has been turned upside down, with minimal fiber and two-thirds or more of our calories coming from carbs.  Since the introduction of CDFs as dietary staples, the United States has become the poster nation for obesity and chronic illness.   

If we want to be healthy, we must learn to eat healthily, which means a return to the nutritional blueprint of the Human Diet.  It means learning how to make smart choices amidst an ever-widening field of cheap, unhealthy options scientifically manufactured to hook us.  It means learning how to think, budget, and shop a certain way.  We must learn and adopt a strategy for how to eat mostly natural, whole foods that are high in fiber and nutrients and lower in carbs.  These are the foods to which we are evolutionarily well-adapted.  In broad nutritional terms, it means eating in a way that keeps our blood sugar relatively stable.  This paper is about how to create good dietary habits that can be sustained for the long-term.  

If you do not care to delve too deeply into the details of this publication, you may refer to the following nine rules and use them as a guide for creating your own healthy diet.  As of the writing of this essay (October, 2015), the following represent the rules that I follow based upon my best assessment of the highest quality and most compelling and current research in the medical, nutrition, and basic science literature.


READ ON: The 9 Rules of Healthy Eating
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