How to Think About Food.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)

Professional links in profile.

One of the great teachers of my life was a woman named AnneMarie Colbin. She founded a school in New York City called the Natural Gourmet Institute. It was primarily a chef training school, but AnneMarie also taught courses in deep food theory. I studied for a year with her in her “Food Therapy” program. It was life altering.

Her definition of health supportive eating went like this: “Health supportive eating means eating food as nature provides it with all of its edible parts intact”. It’s essentially a whole foods approach to eating. For her, a (real) food would ideally be thought of as a living system in which an appropriate (for human consumption) group of nutrients exist in the proper proportions to one another. Our human bodies have been engaging with these living systems for centuries.

[I am offering a discounted block of 4 sessions for $599 for first time clients. Use Link-tree in profile or message me directly ]

For AnneMarie, a health supportive food was one which was not in any way processed. So brown rice was on the menu. White rice was not. Carrots were on the menu, carrot juice was not. Milk was on the menu. Skim milk was not. She had a great faith in the engagement of food “as nature provides it” and the human body.

When it came to food selection, she suggested you ask two questions.

The first was “what was added or taken away?” When you look at a food, if you can perform e that something was added or taken away, this might not qualify as a “whole” food for her. If your bread is “fortified with essential vitamins and minerals” it didn’t qualify for her menu because things have been added which threw off the natural balance of nutrients and thus the engagement of the human body with it. She would talk about how nutrients in the proper (natural) proportion work in the body to facilitate the work of each other nutrient. Added minerals in the body like calcium are often found gathered in joints of people who have passed away. In her mind this was because the body didn’t know what to do with them. I’m the other hand, white rice is brown rice which has had the nutrients and fiber removed. This will provoke the insulin system to work to reduce the damage of the sugar which it would otherwise not have to do if all the nutrients were there.

Her second question was to inquire how many steps away from its original nature it was. Again if you have brown rice on a plate in front of you, you can track that back like two steps. It was steamed and before that it was removed from the grassy plant it grows on. Two steps. Easy to track. On the other hand, if you had a pop tart in front of you, your mind would collapse just trying to figure out what the shiny specks on the top were and where they came from. AnneMarie thought the body would have a similar degree of struggle integrating such a “food like substance” into the body. It might be worth considering avoiding such a food.

Colbin was not strict, she suggested staying in this model 90 percent of the time and yes, having the ice cream and pizza and whatever else you wanted the other 10 percent of the time. She believed that food ultimately had to be enjoyable.

Tomorrow I’ll share her 7 criteria for food selection. Until then try out the two inquiries and make a conscious assessment of the food you’re eating.

Only in the last century have we seen the degree of industrialization of food that we live with. We are literally what we eat. Food partially conditions the functioning and overall health of the body, impacts our emotional life, moods, mind states and ability to think and concentrate. It is an incredibly powerful variable in our lives. We cannot function optimally and be careless with food selection.