The paleo way to get your health under control

If you’re interested in feeling healthier, living longer and losing weight with the paleo diet, there’s one technique that can get you a long way to your goal.

You can learn how to cook your own meals.

And if you want to follow a paleo way of eating, this is going to be a necessity. There’s no way around the need to make most of your meals at home. Yes, I know, that means more time in the kitchen than most Americans want to spend. But this type of meal preparation time is well worth it. And it’s the only way to truly control the nutrients in your meals and make sure you are eating the kind of diet that keeps you at your best.

The problem with “natural” flavors

One of the chief problems with packaged foods, even if they’re not junk food, is that you have no control over their ingredients. That’s true even if the packaging claims that the contents are “all-natural.”

For more than 30 years, since the mid-1980s, both the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission have refused to define the word “natural” as it pertains to foods.

The term, as used by food companies, is essentially meaningless.

At one point, food companies were even trying to claim that the artificial sweetener aspartame was “natural” because it was “made from natural ingredients.

Who stopped them? That grand arbiter of health food, the Council of Better Business Bureaus.

Meanwhile, the term “natural flavors” that appears on so many food packages can indicate the presence of all sorts of chemicals cooked up in laboratories as long as the food manufacturer can also cook up reasons that those chemicals can be considered “natural.”

For example, instead of using plant oils in many “natural flavors” companies are now getting them from special bacteria and yeast that can produce similar substances that can be added to food.

Eat at home for better health

A study at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that people who frequently prepare their own meals in the kitchen eat healthier and consume fewer empty calories that have zero nutrition or are high-glycemic.

“When people cook most of their meals at home, they consume fewer carbohydrates, less sugar and less fat than those who cook less or not at all – even if they are not trying to lose weight,” says researcher Julia A. Wolfson.

Wolfson says she recognizes that all of us are pressed for time. But her research shows that the health benefits of cooking your own food presents significant rewards.

And I’m with her. My health didn’t improve significantly until I started cooking my own food and ditching added sugar and unhealthy, over-processed vegetable oils from my meals.

“Obesity is an escalating public health problem that contributes to other serious health issues, including diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease,” says Wolfson. “The evidence shows people who cook at home eat a more healthy diet.”

Stay away from the TV

If you do decide to cook at home, though, be warned, the cooking shows that are so popular on television do not, as a rule, offer healthy recipes.

Research at Cornell and the University of Vermont show that people who follow the directions offered on these shows weigh, on average, 11 pounds more than folks who watch the shows without making the recipes.

“One reason for this phenomenon may be that often the recipes portrayed on TV are not the healthiest and allow you to feel like it’s OK to prepare and indulge in either less nutritious food or bigger portions,” says researcher Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.

Instead, look for paleo recipes on Nom Nom Paleo, Paleo Grubs and PaleoPlan.

If you start preparing your own dishes from scratch, you’ll quickly learn that cooking paleo isn’t difficult. And the meals taste better than anything you can heat up that comes in a box.