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THE KITCHEN ACTIVIST
THE KITCHEN ACTIVIST podcast will give you bite-size action steps in each episode you can implement NOW in your kitchen, the most effective place to grow well-being for people and our planet. The host is the award-winning author of EAT LESS WATER and Kitchen Activist Florencia Ramirez.
THE KITCHEN ACTIVIST
THE SHOCKING TRUTH ABOUT ULTRA-PROCESSED FOODS AND HOW YOU CAN FIGHT BACK FROM YOUR KITCHEN
Have you ever thought about the power of your kitchen? This episode of The Kitchen Activist is about to shatter your preconceptions and reveal the shocking truth about ultra-processed foods. I'm going far beyond the well-trodden path of health concerns and delving into the environmental havoc these food products can wreak - from climate change and water scarcity to deforestation and pollution. But it's not all gloom. I'm also arming you with the knowledge you need to fight back. Get ready to redefine your grocery shopping strategy, navigate the maze of ingredient labels, and embrace the benefits of organic and plant-based meals.
Transform your kitchen into a hub of environmental activism. Minimizing ultra-processed food in your diet boosts your health and significantly contributes to the planet. Discover how home-cooked meals are often more resource-efficient than the so-called 'food waste reducing' ultra-processed options. The episode also challenges the popular notion that ultra-processed foods are cheaper, shedding light on the actual cost of these products.
Join me, Florencia Ramirez, as we re-imagine food systems and make choices that benefit our health and collective well-being. You're not just a consumer; you're a Kitchen Activist. Tune in and take a stand!
I refer to the following interview/study:
Packaged Foods Labeled as Organic Have a More Healthful Profile Than Their Conventional Counterparts, According to Analysis of Products Sold in the U.S. in 2019–2020
Click here for the free How to Eat Less Water CONDIMENT STORAGE TABLE. It is a printable list of popular condiments that belong in the pantry and those in the refrigerator that can be hung in your kitchen for easy reference.
Download the TEN TIPS to EAT LESS WATER SUMMER PARTY PLANNING GUIDE for all the tips, steps, and info on celebrating like a kitchen activist with your friends and family.
Find gifts designed to serve well-being at the Eat Less Water Shop.
Get a copy of the EAT LESS WATER book.
Reach me at info@eatlesswater.com
Welcome, I'm glad you're here. Together, we will turn our shared concern about the state of our environment into a force for change. It will require you to reimagine the role of your home kitchen as more than a warehouse of food or a room where we cook and gather to eat. The time has come to enter your kitchen with eyes open to the transformative power it harnesses for the planet and you. The home kitchen has always been ground zero for positive environmental and social change, waiting for you to take your position as a kitchen activist. Now that you arrived, you will change the world with what you eat. Welcome, I'm so glad you're here. This is Florentia Ramirez and I'm the host of this podcast, which I call the Kitchen Activist, and I hope you're here because you are a kitchen activist and you want to make a difference with your food, starting with your next meal. And I am really fired up today about this particular topic. I was just listening to an NPR interview with an author who wrote a book called Ultra Processed People. I will link the interview in the show notes because it is absolutely worth a listen.
Speaker 1:Currently, anywhere between 60 to 80% of our intake of calories is based on ultra processed foods. Before I go any further. Let me just spend a moment on what is the difference between processed foods and ultra processed foods, because the distinction is important and oftentimes we are confused by the difference on purpose. So, for example, yesterday I made a pot of beans because I cooked dry beans and into a bean that we can eat. That is a processed food, but clearly that's good for you, right? Processed foods is just changing the nature of that food by roasting, cooking, canning, fermenting right, that's fine.
Speaker 1:What is ultra processed foods is what's connected to all the things that are causing such destruction on this planet Extractive, big agriculture that relies on petroleum based products, like chemicals and petroleum based fertilizers. It's not our fault that this is what we find as the choice in the grocery store. Young people, like teenagers, they're finding that 80% of their diet is coming from ultra processed foods. So it just gets me mad because it's making us sick. They're finding this type of food is a link to cancer. They're finding that it's changing the microbiomes of our guts, which totally makes sense to me when I look at soil health, for example, when soil is alive with that microbiology which I'd like to talk about, because that is exactly what we need thriving around this planet because it produces more nutritious food. The food or the plants that are growing in that soil require less water up to 10,000 times less water because the soil acts like a sponge and is able to draw water down instead of water sliding off or evaporating before it can replenish aquifers, those groundwater lakes that we can't see but are so critical. And healthy soil alive with microbiology. Those microbes are also able to scrub carbon, which is a greenhouse gas, from the sky and put it in the ground Well, our guts. When they're healthy and alive also with that good bacteria, it keeps us healthy. But when we eat this ultra-processed food, it is stripping away the microbiology in our guts and soil.
Speaker 1:And people who are advocating for this type of food and studies that are funded by businesses and institutions profiting from this type of food are suggesting that by extending the shelf life with these food additives, they're doing us a favor because it is reducing food waste. I certainly am a huge advocate of reducing food waste. We have to reduce food waste because that rotting food is emitting methane gas, which is contributing to climate change. So I get it and it takes water and we don't want to waste food, but it's confusing us and confusing the kitchen activists, because the problem with that reasoning is the same food that's in the box that can last a year or even longer on the shelf required much more water. It required petroleum based ingredients, like chemicals, from the seed all the way to the box, very extractive methods that are contributors to climate change, to water scarcity, deforestation and water pollution. But then you can tell me that I'm doing a good thing for the environment or that they're doing a good thing for the environment because, even though it required all of those practices that are devastating to the environment and to our human health, at least at the very least, it's not contributing to food waste because it can last on your shelf, because of all of the additives, for one year. That makes no sense, but it does absolutely confuse the consumer to think that it's okay that these food additives are okay, that this ultra-processed food is the way forward, right, and it's not.
Speaker 1:This is part of how we need to reimagine our food systems. We need to take back our food systems so that they are in alignment with nature. They're in alignment with producing healthy outcomes for people in the planet and ultra processed foods that our kids, especially, are eating not just at home, but that's also what they're getting fed in many cafeterias around our country. I remember when I used to substitute teach and I would go into the cafeteria from to get lunch, and I remember some days they would give, at this particular in this particular district near me, these peanut butter well, what they call peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that were like smushed ultra processed breads, because there's processed breads and there's ultra processed breads, and the breads that we get from the baker and from the farmer's market are not using all of these different ingredients that we would not find in our cupboards. That really is the difference between processed and ultra processed foods. But is there ingredients that we wouldn't find in a normal kitchen? So things like I'm just gonna read off some of the ingredients that you may see on a box of ultra processed foods an ore bag like high fructose, corn syrup, invert sugar, modified starches like modified corn starches, hibernated oils and colorings, de-foaming, bulking, bleaching agents, hydrolyzed protein. Those are substances that you would not find in a kitchen for your cooking. That's like an easy way to make the distinction between a processed food and an ultra processed food and not to let the big food industry industrialized food complex to confuse us on the two, because they are very different.
Speaker 1:Processed foods A nice bowl of beans or a delicious bowl of rice with vegetables is not ultra processed food. It is processed because you had to steam it or roast it and it's also building the good bacteria in your guts that help keep us healthy, because we are mirrors of this planet. Again and again there's just examples of our guts that keep us healthy and the microbiology of soil that keeps the planet healthy, and both are suffering because of a food system that is based on profit, profit, profit for some, but not the mid. As a kitchen activist, we are opening our eyes, paying attention to the ingredients going into our food, into the agricultural methods that are producing that food and then bringing it into our kitchens and working on ways to extend its shelf life. That's not based on food additives, but rather on organizational methods that can keep food for as long as we can, and it's also planning how we're utilizing those ingredients once we bring them into our kitchen. So we're not reliant on food additives to keep food from rotting, but rather we're using old ways of thinking and planning for food.
Speaker 1:Let's go into the action steps of how we can build more real foods into our diet, how we can pare down the ultra process foods. I certainly have some ultra process foods in my pantry if you were to open it up right now, because I have kids too who are asking for bags of chips, and this is not about perfection. But what can we do to lower our ultra process foods in our kitchens because of the destruction it's doing to the planet and also the destruction it's doing to our bodies. If it's not good for a river, it's not good for our bodies, and if it's not good for the soil, then it's not good for our guts, our microbiomes that we have going on in our own body. So the action steps the first is to meal plan. We eat healthier, naturally, when you meal plan, because if there's a plan for dinner plus the already purchased ingredients waiting in the kitchen, you will cook more often, you will eat out less, you will eat less prepackaged foods, and this is not just if you have a family.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I'm by myself when I'm in Santa Fe and sometimes I'll start to think well, I don't need to meal plan, because it's just me. Why am I not enough to meal plan and to feed myself nutritious foods? Or if it's Michael and I just the two of us there we still have to meal plan because we're eating and if we find that if we don't meal plan, we are eating out a whole lot more, or we're snacking more because you're going through your cupboards and your refrigerator and just like pulling out stuff when you cook more dinners, then you find that you have more leftovers that are also nutritious foods for you to eat for your lunches throughout the week, like if you open my refrigerator now, you'll see a homemade pesto that I can make with some pasta. I have rice with stir-fried vegetables that was left over from a meal. I have veggie pozole that was left over. There I have three meals that I can easily reheat and turn into a lunch. So instead of reaching into the freezer for some ultra processed package food or into our snack containers and start munching on chips or crackers that are also ultra processed, then I can minimize that snacking because I've had a really good meal for lunch as well as my dinner. It just naturally happens and, according to researchers at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, people who frequently cook meals at home consume fewer calories, carbohydrates, sugar and fat than those who cook less often.
Speaker 1:The second would be look at labels. Pay attention to those ingredients that you would not have in your kitchen, that you would not normally cook with, because that is a red flag to say this is ultra processed food, irregardless of what the packaging is telling you. But it could say it's all natural, which means nothing. What really tells you what is inside of that box or bag of food is what is listed in the ingredients, and you really want to just pick things that have very few ingredients. Pasta, I want it just to say semolina, flour and water, and that's it. I don't need it to have any other ingredients. If I am picking up salt, for example, I want it just to have salt, not an anti-caking agent, which many salts do have. We want to make sure we're mindful of the foods that we're putting into our grocery carts.
Speaker 1:The third is to buy more organic foods, and this is a little tricky because it's not to say that organic foods cannot be ultra processed, but they do have fewer synthetic additives that are permitted in the processing of organic foods. If I buy a Twinkie, whether it's conventional or organic, it's still not good for you, right? There is a study I'm going to link that talks more about it. It's called Package. Foods Labeled as Organic have a more helpful profile than their conventional counterparts, according to analysis of products sold in the US, and they looked at 8,240 organic products and 72,000 conventional food products sold in the US and then they compared things like sugar, added sugar, saturated fat, sodium content between these different labels. It is a really interesting study, so I will have that in the show notes for you, as well as the link for that NPR interview that got me going on this topic today.
Speaker 1:The last point I want to make or address is the cost, because the food industry that advocates ultra-processed foods will say that it extends shelf life, so then that's good for the environment and it also is cheaper. It's producing cheaper food for people, which is good. We want cheaper food because not everybody has food budgets that can go out and buy organic food. So that is the argument. The cost of food is going up, but ultra processed foods is also not cheap. When you buy a bag of chips, it is not cheap food, and then the overall negative health impacts that come with it is costly for the individual and also for us as a collective society. Oftentimes we'll hear certain things and we believe them to be true because we hear them so many times like organic food or real food is too costly. So what does that mean? So that means people of color or people who are under resource then are stuck with this low quality food that's causing some serious health issues, like cancers, and when you start to break it down.
Speaker 1:So what I did this morning is I spent some time looking at what would be the cost of ingredients if I were to make a lasagna a beef lasagna, a serving size of 12, using organic ingredients like organic pasta, organic Valley mozzarella and ricotta, cans of organic tomatoes, organic Parmesan cheese and organic ground beef. What would that cost versus going to target in purchasing ultra process family size lasagna that serves seven? So in order to make this comparison, I assumed that I would need to buy two boxes of the lasagna from the freezer section. To compare that to one homemade pasta, the cost for the homemade pasta with the organic ingredients is $30, is about $30. If I were to buy two boxes of the ultra process lasagna from Target, it would cost me $28.60. So the difference in cost is not very much. You have to spend the time to make the homemade organic pasta versus purchasing something that's convenient, convenient.
Speaker 1:There are the trade-offs for that convenience right, a trade-off in our health and the health of our planet, and that is where I draw the line. As a kitchen activist, I am unwilling to make that trade-off. I am empowered to make different choices in my own kitchen that are climate solutions, saving water, that are contributing to the health of the planet, my individual health and the health of the people around, and to me that feels really good. I'm not going to believe the marketing of many of these brands that have a lot to gain in our disinformation. In summary, the things we can do one meal plan, meal plan meal plan to eat healthier food and to cook more food from scratch more often in your kitchen.
Speaker 1:Two, look at labels. If there's anything on that label that you would not have in your own kitchen or is not in a standard kitchen, then leave it on the shelf. And three, buy more organic foods. And again, while this is an imperfect system because there are organic foods that are older, processed and pushing back against corporations that have their hand in organic and are trying to water down that organic label, and us, as consumers, need to push back and leave some of those organic labeled foods on the shelf to say, hey, wait a minute, we're not interested in ultra processed foods, whether it's organic or not organic, but there are regulations and standards around that, unlike the conventional counterpart of those foods. It is a simple way to know that you are minimizing automatically ultra processed food in your diet if you're purchasing organic labeled foods. And the fourth thing I would add to it is just eat more plants. If we just eat more plants, instead of reaching for chips, why not reach for grapes or slices of melon, whatever fruits and vegetables that are in season, and you can find that easily at your farmers market. Those are the action steps meal plan. Look at labels, more organic foods and eat more plants.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for joining me. Please reach out. I would love to hear what you're doing in your kitchen and ideas on how we can strengthen our kitchen activism together. Be well, let's stay connected. Sign up for my newsletter and receive more tips in your inbox weekly and 15% off your first purchase at the Eat Less Water Shop. You can also find me on your favorite social media space. At Eat Less Water. Please remember to hit subscribe and leave a review, even if it's only the star rating, because every one of them will increase the chances of other like-minded folks to find us. Thank you for joining me on this journey to Eat Less Water. Together, we will write the story of wellbeing for this planet we have the privilege to call home. Meet you back here every Wednesday. There is power in the collective.