When I started trying to get healthier, a doctor told me to avoid processed food. Her definition of processed was anything in a package that contained more than 5 ingredients. It’s another arbitrary number – people in industry and government are arguing over how to define the word “processed” – but the point is we should eat REAL FOOD. Our bodies were designed to run on real food. Having the number 5 in my mind reminds me to READ LABELS. Every single one. Marketing in the food space is powerful, sometimes deceptive, and often confusing. How many times have I come home from the grocery store thinking I had purchased a healthy product based on the FRONT of the package – to then discover, from the label on the back, that it contains industrial seed oils, hidden sugars, dyes, etc. Grrr…

Photo: ingredient list for Cheeto’s, one of my favorite snacks from the old days.

God also said: See, I give you every seed-bearing plant on all the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food…And so it happened…God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good. Genesis 1:29