Yes, You Do Have Time To Eat Right

Fast food seems like a good deal:  cheap, tasty, efficient, convenient. Right?

Well, maybe.  But it’s also true that people die from the habit of eating high-calorie, high-sugar, high-fat, low-nutrition junk food.

The term “fast food” might trick us into believing we’ll be happily sped along in our daily race against time.  But  habitually consuming “fast food” can truly slow us down, so much that we become utterly clogged up, overweight, undernourished, very tired, and prematurely dead.

Have you seen the movie “Super Size Me?”  What a fascinating documentary.  Starring the filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock, it shows what happens to a man who eats nothing but McDonald’s food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for 30 days.  Spurlock’s “before,” “during,” and “after” medical exams show absolutely horrific changes to his body systems.  Ugh!

That documentary blew my mind and turned me off, way off, fast food.

I never was a fast food lover, to tell you the truth.  Yet my culinary weakness, European gourmet “slow” food, is no less artery-clogging or any more disease-defying.  Whether it’s fast food or slow food, unhealthy food kills.  This much we know.

So why, why do we still imbibe?  Maybe we are juggling so many priorities that we forget that actually staying alive should remain close to the top of our lists.

In our superspeedy lifestyles, the priority of healthy cooking and eating often squirms at the bottom of the priority list, weighed under the time crunch.  Some of us get overwhelmed thinking of the cost of buying so much fresh, nutritious food.  Some of us sigh at the idea of finding the energy to prepare the food.  Some of us get distracted by the fun factor of junk food.  And we do not want to spend our precious time to buy, wash, dice, cook, serve, and clean up the life-saving food.

So because we don’t make it a priority now, then later, (too late) we lie in a hospital bed with a heart attack, stroke or diabetes.  It’s a proven fact; habitual junk food eating leads to disease and death.

We don’t want to live with remorse.  It’s worth trying. I am here to remind us that we do have time to eat right, now.  Otherwise, we’ll find the time when we are lying in the hospital bed.

The fact is, we don’t have to cook like the people on the t.v. healthy-cooking shows to cook disease-and death-defying masterpieces.  We don’t have to have one hundred and thirty eight ingredients in the soup.  We don’t need to make healthy cooking so expensive, time consuming, and complicated.

Expensive and complicated can taste great– but not always!  Sometimes the simplest, easiest meals are the cheap and fast!

I have a large and hungry family. Tonight I am serving up potato soup in bread bowls, because potatoes are extremely cheap and very healthy.

How I did it:  I diced and threw the following in a pot:   9 potatoes, 2 carrots, 2 celery stalks, a bunch of scallions, some water, 2 cans of low-sodium chicken stock (no MSG added; MSG gives my husband headaches).  It’s simmering all day.   Later, just before dinnertime, I’ll add a little cream, a cup of cheese, some salt and pepper, and I’ll serve it in whole wheat bread bowls.  It took me less than ten minutes to wash and dice the veggies.  It was easy and so cheap.  I estimate that the ingredients I used for this meal, which will serve six, cost me about $7 max.  That’s $1.16 per person.  And it can be done in a crock pot or a regular pot, easily.

The potatoes that make up the bulk of tonight’s dinner contain:

• twice as much potassium as a banana or an avocado
• no fat
• 45% of the daily recommended amount of Vitamin C (!)
• 15% of the daily fiber requirement
• lots of minerals and vitamins, including magnesium and B6.

So, instead of thinking about “fast food” as the cheap stuff to drive-through for, think of it as the stuff that speeds you along the fast track to disease and death.

And think of creating your own, new and improved, completely different type of good fast food that you make yourself, to create longevity and a fatter wallet for your family.

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