What to Eat: Food that’s good for your health, pocket and plate. Joanna Blythman

if you can’t cook meals from scratch all the time, it is important to recognize that cooking from raw materials gives you infinitely more control over the quality of what you eat than if you rely on convenience foods. The more food you eat that isn’t home-made, the poorer your diet is likely to be, both in terms of nutrition, and the quality and provenance of the ingredients used. If you surrender sovereignty of what you eat by becoming dependent on convenience foods, the fatter you, and any other members of your household, are likely to become and the more readily your nagging concerns about not eating well can be exploited by food manufacturers selling you technofoods that make dubious health claims. Every meal that you take back under your control by cooking yourself, the better your health and your spirits will be, and the more pleasure you will get from the act of eating.

      If you have got out of, or have never acquired, the habit of cooking, revisit this default setting. Cooking needn’t be arduous. If you are one of those people who only think about food at the last minute, you may find yourself in shops where your choice is likely to be very restricted, and therefore forced to buy a lot of expensive rubbish. To alter your habits, you will need to decide in advance roughly what you are going to eat, then make sure that you have the ingredients. Other more creative cooks get ideas from shopping in stimulating places with inspiring ingredients, such as markets and small food shops, and then just come home and throw it all together. Either way, you can make life easier for yourself by cooking more than you need so that you can have the same thing later in the week, perhaps in a slightly different form or with different accompaniments. And here, your freezer will prove to be a trusty friend. Cook once, eat twice, or even thrice.

      Don’t be a sucker for processed foods

      Here’s one thing you need to know: the more processed a food is, the worse it is for you. Food processing is the food industry’s way of making profit by taking apart natural foods and reinventing them in more lucrative form. Not usually to your nutritional benefit either, irrespective of what the label might claim. Commodity crops like wheat and corn, stripped of most of their beneficial nutrients, then loaded with sugar, salt and a sprinkling of synthetic vitamins, are presented as a nutritious breakfast. Industrially refined oils are chemically hardened, mixed with additives and water then reborn as ‘heart-healthy’ spreads. Who needs them?

      Reconstructed, over-processed foods don’t have the trustworthy track record of whole foods in their natural form. They contain novel ingredients and obscure additives produced by hi-tech methods and have only been on our plates for a relatively short period of time. This is already long enough to suggest that they are significant contributors to the major modern problems of obesity, food allergies and diet- related disease.

      OK, there are exceptions. Cheese, butter, yogurt and bread are all processed foods, and, let’s face it, few of us are going to get round to making these ourselves. But you can buy those that were made in the traditional way, using time-honoured techniques to alter primary ingredients.

      Don’t buy food with ingredients you won’t find in a domestic larder

      It’s a safe bet that you don’t have mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids in your storecupboard, nor high-fructose corn syrup, guar gum, partially hydrogenated vegetable fat, soya protein isolate, liquid pasteurized egg nor maltodextrin. The only people who have these, and other weird but not wonderful synthetic chemical food ingredients lining their shelves, are lab-coated food technologists whose job is to find new and ever more inventive ways to make even more money from the over-processing of food. And guess what? Your health is not their priority. So if you don’t know what an ingredient is, or it has a long, unpronounceable name that reads like an algebraic formula, then don’t buy any food product containing it. Every item you see listed on an ingredient label should be readily understandable and familiar. If it isn’t, avoid it like the plague.

      Be sceptical about nutrition advice from ‘experts’

      The dietetic establishment has led us to believe that food is merely fuel and healthy eating is just a straightforward matter of calculating the number of calories we need for our body weight and activity level. Grub in, energy out. That’s all there is to it. This mechanical approach plays right into the hands of the food industry. Following this nutritional script, it doesn’t matter whether we eat technofood or natural food because everything comes down to a simple arithmetical calculation. Common sense alone dictates that there is more to food and eating than that.

      Don’t hold your breath for learned, silvery-haired nutritionists to spell out the universal magic formula for healthy eating. Research into what constitutes optimum nutrition is best thought of as a work in progress, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is being simplistic and misleading. So instead, use your common sense. Base your diet on tried and tested unprocessed foods, studiously ignoring fads and showing healthy scepticism towards everything from top-down government health orthodoxy to the latest trendy diet.

      These days, many foods come with an abundance of nutrition labels and supposedly helpful logos to help you assess the healthiness or otherwise of their contents. Mostly this is a confusing waste of time. Sometimes it is a deliberate red herring used by the manufacturers to bamboozle you and make you think a low-grade processed food is better than it might otherwise seem. Ignore nutrition labels and logos, and cut to the chase by looking at the ingredients label. Basically, the more ingredients listed, the more suspect the product is.

      Don’t dismiss traditional food knowledge

      Certain foods – beetroot, celery, raw milk, ginger, suet, garlic, yogurt, cabbage and carrots, for instance – figure in traditional medicine systems around the world as having beneficial medicinal and nutritional properties. It is currently fashionable to dismiss any such collective wisdom on the grounds that it isn’t ‘evidence-based’ – in the narrow, western, medical sense – and so little better than superstition. This is blinkered thinking. There is much to be said for the quasi-medical, nutritional knowledge that has been built up by different cultures and tested out and observed informally in human populations over time. When your grandmother told you that a hot honey and lemon drink would do you more good than any cough medicine, she wasn’t making it up. She was simply passing on the accumulated wisdom and experience of the generations that came before her. That knowledge is like gold dust.

      Practise vegetable-centric eating

      Of course, it doesn’t make sense to shut your ears entirely to ongoing discussions of nutrition, and there is some overlapping middle ground where otherwise diverse researchers and would-be authorities can agree. There is, for instance, no argument that vegetables are brilliant for you. It’s not just all the vitamins, minerals and soluble fibre that are beneficial; research is gradually identifying a number of phytochemicals, or natural compounds in vegetables, that are both health-enhancing and protective against disease. The early twentieth-century view, that vegetables were relatively unimportant in the diet because they consist mainly of water, has been radically revised. Currently, putting vegetables more at the core of your diet seems to be a key strategy for being healthy. Think in terms of vegetable-centric eating, where protein, fat and carbohydrate-based ingredients play second fiddle to vegetables, not the other way round.

      Eat some protein

      Realistically, you aren’t going to live solely on vegetables. A bit of protein still has its place, whether it’s from fish, meat, eggs, dairy foods or from vegan sources, such as pulses. Protein is emerging in research as the macronutrient most capable of satisfying hunger. As your grandmother might have put it: ‘It keeps you going.’ If you do eat protein in the form of meat, poultry, milk and eggs, try to make sure that it comes from free-range animals that have been fed on grass and other natural pasture foods. It will be better for you.

      Rethink what you have been told about fat and cholesterol

      That big bad dietary bogeyman – saturated fat – is being rehabilitated. Contrary to what we have been led to believe, there is an absence of evidence to support the nutritional mantra that fat is bad for health, or even to back the assumption that the naturally occurring fat that you find in whole foods is intrinsically fattening. Increasingly, the health benefits of natural saturated fat are being acknowledged. Saturated fats are key components of cell membranes and essential for the