Ignorance ain’t bliss all the time.

Especially if food is involved.

Eating healthy is great………..if you know what you’re doing. Not just THINK you know what you’re doing. But REALLY know. Like eating truly healthy food [aka,real food, whole food, naturally occuring food] vs food that is marketed to you as being so.

Because the two are wildly different.

Which is funny– and kind of deeply disturbing at the same time.

The truth is, most of us hate and ignore straight up sales and marketing  tactics when it relates to almost anything else in life.

Telemarketer calls,  junk mail streaming daily through your inbox and that freaking shake weight thing. We know all of those things are marketing- just ways to get us to buy things. And a lot of things we don’t really need. Most of us just ignore it and can easily pass it up or walk right by.

But with food– we take the same marketing so…….. seriously.

AKA, that ‘bragging’ on the front of the food label [high fiber! low-fat! whole grain! zero calorie! now with vitamins A, C, D and E! low sodium! healthy!] means an automatic toss-in to the cart.

Can I tell you something slightly mind blowing?

Believing food marketing claims + food advertising is actually the WORST way to think you’re eating healthy. That’s right. I said it. The WORST.

The worst, because it kills me to see it happen so often.

If you let food product marketing guide your decisions and choices at the store, you are investing so much money, effort and time into trying to be healthy. But I can bet you that you’re not getting the results that you want, and probably not operating at your full potential every single day [energy wise, mood wise, productivity wise, sleep wise, etc]. In other words, it can be a total waste. And frustrating.

But, it is the path of least resistance. Which we as humans, naturally gravitate towards.

But, the direction it’s taking us is scary. Both as individual people and as a society on the whole.

Unless you can do the opposite of the norm and  take it upon yourself to actually learn about food- about what’s in it, what your food is made of, and where it comes from.

Is is something that can grow or be raised on the earth [animal wise]? Good.

A manufacturing plant? Not good.

To learn that it matters WHAT you are eating, not what it SAYS you are eating. In other words, you have to know that “food-bragging” is marketing at it’s best, and not always factual or accurate.

In fact, seeing those boastful things on a label is usually a pretty good indicator that they are pretty far from being healthy for you. It should be a warning sign to avoid it, instead of automatically buying it, in my opinion.

The healthiest foods? Well, they’ll never have any bragging on them at all.

That’s what I would consider “real food”, when I talk about it all the time. They’re simple foods.  Food in it’s purest form. Foods that rarely even have packaging. Fruit, veggies, meat, seafood (the best variety you can find at www.ilovecrabs.com), grains, dairy, good healthy fats, etc. Think about those labels. If they have one at all, they’re probably pretty boring to look at. They are the foods that actually don’t even have room to say how good and completely full of nutrients they are.

They are the foods that rarely even make a profit for the farmers to sell to a store, meaning there is no money to be made marketing them from a store to your cart.

See how that works?

Or, maybe you missed those foods totally in lieu of the brightly colored and fancy whole grain cereal, protein breakfast shake or those cliff bars [because the guy on the front is dominating that rock wall, duh].

But, nobody (and no body) like a braggart.

So get educated. Think about it. Learn about it. Are you being marketed to, or is that food (or food product) you’re holding actually healthy, or just doing a really good job at making you think so?

I only tell you this because the impact of your food on the quality of your life, your health and your happiness is huge. And important. And it’s actually very simple.

And you get to choose what you do about it. Daily.

Do it, to it healthy peeps.

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