Kale chips and the mystery goo

I bring fresh kale chips to my talks and just about everywhere else I go. Organic kale, avocado oil, sesame seeds. Every so often, I watch a grown adult take the tiniest little bite.

Then I hold up a snack cake with mystery goo in the middle. If you'd never seen one before, you'd still take a big bite to reach the goo. You don't even know what it is.

“Nobody is afraid of the goo. We're afraid of the kale.”

When did that happen?

Count the real food

Flip the package over. Skip the nutrition facts and read the ingredients. Then count how many you would recognize as actual food, like wheat, eggs or sugar.

The rest is mostly chemicals.

We are Pavlov's dogs

Once I started paying attention, I noticed something about myself. If someone behind me opened a crinkly package, my brain went straight to “that sounds good. Maybe it's Doritos.” Then they'd walk by, and it was a printer cartridge. It wasn't food at all. We've learned that packages mean food.

That isn't an accident. Food companies hire scientists to find the “bliss point,” where a flavor lights up the same areas of the brain that cocaine does. Doritos were my favorite, too. We're all subject to it.

How so many chemicals got into our food

The food industry industrialized in a big way in the 80s, and it changed everything. I don't think my grandma would have looked at a Go‑Gurt and called it food. Part of the reason is a program called GRAS, short for “generally recognized as safe.” Under it, the company that makes a chemical can decide for itself that it's safe to put in our food or on our skin, without an independent safety review. That's how our shelves filled up with so many chemicals.

What the kale chip is actually doing

• Vitamins A, C and K.
• Antioxidants that neutralize free radicals.
• Fiber that feeds the good bacteria in your gut.
• Sulforaphane, a powerful plant medicine that supports your liver's detox process.
• Avocado oil for healthy monounsaturated fat, and sesame seeds for more fiber, calcium, iron and protein.

That's nutrition, and it matters all the way down to the cell. Every cell has mitochondria, its energy factory, and they run on basics like B vitamins, magnesium, selenium and coenzyme Q10. Sluggish cells make a sluggish organ, and a sluggish liver slows the whole body. Some packaged foods are fortified with vitamins, but there is something about the way our bodies use nutrients that come from whole food.

Six upgrades from my grocery store tours

1. Rotate your plants. If you never eat a bell pepper, the microbes that break down bell peppers die off, because nothing feeds them. A diverse plate builds a diverse gut and a stronger immune system. Love kale chips? Try parsnip chips too.
2. Lean on cruciferous vegetables. Kale, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage. Their sulforaphane helps your liver clear what you can't control in a world full of chemicals.
3. Add a bitter. True cacao is bitter, and bitter tastes switch on your calm, rest and digest nervous system, so you make the enzymes and stomach acid you need to break food down. Its flavonoids feed good bacteria too, and cacao can help raise nitric oxide, which matters for healthy blood flow.
4. Eat the fruit, not the juice. The fiber softens the blood sugar spike. If you want a small shot of pomegranate juice (its polyphenols feed a bacteria tied to blood sugar control and weight), have some nuts first so the protein, fat and fiber go in before the sugar.
5. Walk after you eat. A leisurely 10 minute walk outside puts your muscles to work soaking up sugar from the meal you just ate.
6. Upgrade your protein, don't drop it. I never tell anyone to give up meat. Protein keeps you strong as you age. Grass fed beef carries more omega 3s and minerals than corn fed. Pasture raised chicken and eggs carry more nutrients. Wild caught salmon and walnuts add the omega 3s most of us are missing. Quality matters.

Your taste buds will change

Here's what nobody tells you about eating clean. After a while, you taste the sweetness in celery. You crave a salad. I get genuinely excited about a big, colorful quinoa bowl. Maybe that's nerdy, but that's where I'm at. We've numbed our taste buds with big hits of salt, sugar and fat. Give them a few weeks, and they come back.

Then real life happens: a summer barbecue, a holiday gathering. You eat the old stuff and think, I don't like how I feel. Your joints hurt again. That's your body talking, and now you can hear it.

• Food
• Gut health
• Blood sugar