A Greener Diet For A Healthier Lifestyle

To start eating greener, healthier food, the first change is to get your food as fresh as possible and prepare it yourself. Get away from hydrogenated fat, monosodium glutamate, artificial sweeteners, flavorings and colorings. Read your labels, avoid processed food and fast food restaurants.

Look for Certified Organic, Certified Naturally Grown and food that is raised or grown as close to you as possible. Local Harvest is a great place to look for farmers' markets, family farms and other sources of food grown in the United States.

Find farms, markets, restaurants and more selling local, sustainable, organic food in the US and Canada at the Eat Well Guide using your postal/zip code.

Those who live in the UK should check out the Wholesome Food Association, BUY-LOCAL.NET and BigBarn.

Littlelocalfood.com has resources for the UK, Canada and US.

Even though the US salmonella outbreak of 2008 is now being blamed on jalapeno peppers, this article, The Tomato Pickle from June 2008, does a great job at explaining why buying local is always the best choice.

It may take a bit of work at first, but once you figure out where to get the freshest food near you, the better off you'll be. If you really can't get fresh locally grown food, try for frozen food, especially frozen vegetables with no additives. Vegetables that have been frozen soon after they were harvested will retain more of their nutrition than ones that either sit in storage, or get shipped long distances.

Don't totally discount canned foods, some things like tomatoes just don't freeze well. Look on the label and see what else went into that can, and is it really something you want to eat? Canned food is better than nothing, and the canning process, while it kills off some nutrition, it also kills off harmful microorganisms.

Tomatoes may be my favorite fresh food. My family has grown tomatoes for as long as I can remember. I can recall one Summer when my grandfather accidentally picked a basket full of unripe tomatoes by accident. My grandmother sliced them, and fried them up for dinner. They still tasted better than just about any store bought tomato I've ever had.

Tomatoes are a great example of how the food you buy in the store, unless the store is getting it from a local farm, is harvested before it is ripe so it can survive storage and transportation conditions. Ethylene gas is used on tomatoes and other fruits to artificially ripen them.

Those green tomatoes I ate as a kid were still better than the artificially ripened store bought tomatoes because they were fresh, we ate them just hours after they had been growing in the garden. If they had been red when picked, they would have been filled with a lot more nutrients than the ones found at the supermarket.

That's not to say that using ethylene gas is always bad, Bananas do not ripen while on the vine, and if you purchase a bunch that still has a lot of green, you can get them to turn yellow faster by just placing them in a paper bag. The bananas naturally emit ethylene gas, and the more gas that gets trapped in the bag, the faster the bananas ripen.

You can even hasten the process by tossing a yellow banana, maybe even one with some brown started, in with the bunch of green bananas.

When we get close to the end of the season, we pick tomatoes just a little before they are fully ripe, especially if there's a risk that they may actually start to go bad before we get to them. Still, the ones we leave out on the window sill to get to that last stage of redness are better than anything I've ever bought in the store.

Learn more at Commercially-Grown and Hydroponic Tomatoes and "Still No Free Lunch: Nutrient levels in U.S. food supply eroded by pursuit of high yields"