I started watching Ina Garten on the Food Network about ten years ago, when I first attempted to make food from scratch instead of from boxes. She told me to buy “good vanilla” and “good olive oil.” So, I did that. When holiday time came, Ina’s advice was to never spare the butter and to always have extra chicken broth on-hand. I did that too. Afterall, if Ina said it, even if it was a little pricier and a bit more work, I was on it.

Her food is aspirational. Like trying to dance or sing—I’m not going to do it perfectly, but I’m going to be better for having tried. And I figure, the more I try, the better I’ll get (okay, maybe that’s not true for the singing).

But in a twist that felt like a departure from her usual commandments, this year, Ina told us to head to the supermarket and stock up on packages in a New York Times article titled, “Ina Garten’s Store-Bought Thanksgiving: To make the holiday easier for home cooks, we asked the culinary contessa to create a menu that lets premade ingredients do much of the work.”

Reading the headline, I felt gut-punched. If Ina was giving up, what hope was there for us mere mortals? But reading the article, I began to get inspired. In my book, Eat Everything, I devote an entire chapter to making more gut-friendly foods with ready-made ingredients that are less processed. Instead of just everyday foods, could the same strategy also work to make holiday meals more gut-friendly?

I decided, like my idol Ina did, to find out.

Pie is not only a Thanksgiving and Christmas staple but a classic American dessert.

And the filling generally isn’t the hard part. It’s the crust that can throw us off track. Could I find a decent pie dough that didn’t have emulsifiers and dough conditioners? I went to Whole Foods to find out.

Wholly Wholesome has a crust that is just flour, palm fruit shortening (which they state is “responsibly sourced”), water, sugar, and salt. No emulsifiers, but also not in stock on the day I went. Instead, Whole Foods was carrying the unrolled-out version by the same company, which contained both guar gum and locust bean gum.

These gum additives have been shown to disrupt the gut microbiome and people seem to feel much better when they cut them out.

So, I also looked at their gluten-free version even though, in general, I eat all the gluten I can. And to my surprise, no gums in the gluten-free pie crust! These gum additives have been shown to disrupt the gut microbiome and people seem to feel much better when they cut them out. There were two reasonable options for ready-made pie crust out there (and I wound up finding another at Trader Joe’s a few days later). The key is to always check the ingredient list, even from a brand you might trust.

Next up, potatoes—a holiday table must-have.

Ina suggests that there are good frozen or refrigerated mashed potatoes out there if you add enough sour cream, parmesan, butter, salt and pepper to the pre-prepared stuff. And it’s true for your gut too.There are brands of pre-mashed potatoes like Simply Potatoes that don’t have much else added to them except for dextrose (which is a simple sugar) and a few probably “okay” preservatives.

Check the sour cream for additives (the affordable Daisy brand has none!) and please take a minute to grate your own parmesan from a block to avoid gut-roiling added anti-caking agents. If you are celebrating Hanukkah (I am!), you can get shredded, frozen potatoes to make latkes—a huge time saver—with the same dextrose and probably “okay” preservatives as the mashed stuff. Just remember to defrost and then drain the shredded potatoes on paper towels to get as much of the moisture out as possible before you mix in the egg, onion, salt and pepper, and fry until golden.

Finally, the main course.

If you are tired of turkey after Thanksgiving, so tired in fact that you don’t feel like making anything at all, you could always pick up a rotisserie chicken, or three. But be careful, a lot of store-prepared poultry has flavor-enhancing additives like maltodextrin that you probably want to avoid if you are going for stomach-safe. Many stores will sell chicken that is just chicken, but don’t forget to check how it’s seasoned for a happier holiday.

We’ve been given permission to make holiday cooking easier to do, now we can also harness our ability to make the shortcuts easier on our stomachs, too.

Gluten and dairy have been deemed the enemy. For some people who have celiac disease or complete lactose intolerance, yes, these foods need to be avoided.

But what about the rest of us?

Many people abandon foods that contain gluten or dairy in the hopes of feeling better. Maybe we have joint pains or stomach trouble. Maybe we are putting on weight and don’t understand why. We start by getting rid of these foods and perhaps feel a little better. So then we hear that we should avoid other foods, like tomatoes or garlic, and drop those. Before we know it, our diets are extremely restricted, but we really don’t feel that much better. There may be an easier and far less restrictive way to improve our health.

The biggest problem in the so-called Standard American Diet, which has now become standard in the diets of almost every country today, is ULTRA-PROCESSED foods.

How can we tell the difference between processed and ultra-processed?

There are a few definitions out there, but I’ve found the simplest way to figure out the ultra-processed stuff that should be avoided is to be on the lookout for certain additives in packaged food.
Is this a perfect method? No. Nothing is perfect. Trying to be perfect is a recipe for feeling inadequate and defeated. The goal is to feel better and that means accepting what we are able to reasonably accomplish in the midst of a busy day. Avoid these additives, eat everything that is actual food, and see how much better you feel.

Carrageenan (commonly used in creams and dairy substitutes for stability)

Cellulose (pre-shredded cheeses and powdered parmesan are generally coated in cellulose. DO NOT use pre-shredded and bagged cheeses which can also contain anti-fungal agents.)

Food Gums (commonly used in shelf stable products like dressings):

• Acacia Gum
• Cellulose Gum (Also called: Carboxymethylcellulose)
• Gellan Gum
• Guar Gum
• Locust Bean Gum (Also called: Carob Bean Gum)
• Xanthan Gum

Inulin (Also called: oligofructose, oligofructose-enriched inulin, chicory root fiber, chicory root extract or fructooligosaccharides)

Lecithin(can be derived from soy, sunflower, or other sources and are used in many different packaged foods, so may be the most difficult to avoid—just do your best, but don’t sweat if you are consuming a little of it)

Modified fill-in-the-blank Starch (used in shelf stable products)

Maltodextrin (used as a flavor enhancer and stabilizer in shelf stable products)

Monoglycerides/Diglycerides (used in breads, especially those that stay soft like flour tortillas that don’t need to be kept frozen)

Polysorbate 60/80  (commonly used in frostings and desserts)

The following are generally used as sugar substitutes. Please just use real sugar (in moderation) and NOT these:

Glycerol (glycerin/e)

Mannitol

Sorbitol

Xylitol

Sucralose

Stevia (Stevioside)

A few years ago, my not-quite-teenage son began commenting on whether or not the food I was making was a “superfood.” Salmon and blueberries had been designated by him as “super” and not because they were particularly tasty (although I think they are). According to my son and the latest articles he had perused on the internet, there was supposedly a magical array of nutrients in the food that would somehow help us to live longer.

“The search for superfoods (or whatever they were called back then) has been a time-honored tradition since at least the 1950s, when American physiologist, Ancel Keys traveled to countries around the Mediterranean and documented their lower rates of heart disease, cancer, and other ailments.”

I was just glad he was eating salmon and blueberries and let him keep on thinking they were magically super since I was also super exhausted trying to get my kids to eat foods that were nutritionally sound. So, if nutritionally sound was being rebranded as super, I wasn’t going to argue the point.

The allure of finding a faraway magical food or foods, is in many ways like the quest for the Fountain of Youth, and so, my son had hit on a historically popular trend. The search for superfoods (or whatever they were called back then) has been a time-honored tradition since at least the 1950s, when American physiologist, Ancel Keys traveled to countries around the Mediterranean and documented their lower rates of heart disease, cancer, and other ailments. He posited it was something in their diet. It was called the Seven Countries Study and like its name implies, Keys looked at food from seven countries—which happens to be a lot of countries and a lot of different foods. The common threads in the so-called Mediterranean Diet, were identified as olive oil, fish, fruits, veggies, nuts, whole grains, and wine.

Scientists wondered what exactly was in those foods that was so super and began doing research studies that added nuts or wine or olive oil to see if those things in isolation were helpful. Many of those studies (though poorly designed) showed that they were. And so, in the coming decades, Americans were encouraged to eat more of those foods. Not a bad idea, but not the whole story either. Despite switching over from canola oil to olive oil and from white pasta to whole grain pasta (which isn’t exactly traditionally Mediterranean), our higher rates of disease persisted. It turns out that you can’t take out two or three components of a healthy diet and add them to an unhealthy diet and viola—expect similar results. Even worse, you can’t extract a chemical or two, package them in a supplement and declare victory over disease.

Resveratrol was supposed to be one of the substances that made blueberries super and was also found in red wine. But instead of having to find berries out of season or drink wine which was high in calories (and also one would be limited by the alcohol content if one were sensible), a pill was created. Why bother with actual foods and beverages if one could just find a magic pill? Better yet, pill purveyors could charge upwards of $100 a bottle and so advertised their wares heavily. By offering the secret to longevity with barely any effort required, daytime talk shows brought in lots of viewers, clinics sprung up, and people parted with billions of dollars. And yet, our life expectancy has not increased.

What is starting to be increasingly recognized by researchers is that it isn’t one substance or a handful of foods that make the Mediterranean Diet special. It isn’t even the Mediterranean. There is longevity to be found around the world (see: “Blue Zone” below) where there are fewer chronic diseases and people live longer lives (but even Blue Zones are somewhat Western-centric and undoubtedly there are many other places that would qualify). Blue Zone residents practice lifestyles where they eat whole, fresh foods, have communities ties, and walk or do a fair amount of physical work. This is what was going on in the Mediterranean when Keys visited.

And yet, as my son made clear, we are still looking for the magical super foods, or even more reductive, magical supplements, when the answer for how to eat and how to live has been staring us in the face for decades (Hint: the answer isn’t in a supplement).

 

In the past decade, we have learned that the more ultra-processed food you eat, the higher your risk of obesity, heart disease, cancer, gastrointestinal maladies, and maybe even dementia. The problem is, these so-called foods are getting harder and harder to avoid. A recent JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) article notes that kids’ consumption of a substance called ultra-processed foods has increased significantly in the past 20 years, going from about 61% to 67% or what is now two-thirds of their diets.

Kids’ consumption of ultra-processed foods has increased to 67% of their diets.

Why are ultra-processed foods so hard to avoid?

The reason these substances are hard to avoid is that they’ve been manufactured and marketed to look like real, actual food, but perhaps a bit cheaper and flashier. Take pizza, for example. My husband likes to make pizza. He makes a dough from scratch with the following ingredients: wheat flour, water, yeast, salt. He makes his sauce from scratch too with tomatoes, salt, pepper, a little bit of sugar, garlic, basil, oregano. The cheese, he buys, but it contains only milk, cultures, and salt. Compare that to the ingredients of a frozen supermarket pizza (which may not be any better, ingredient-wise than the take-out pizza you get from your local chain). Can you picture what all the individual ingredients in my husband’s pizza look like in your mind’s eye? Now can you picture what all the ingredients listed on the frozen pizza look like? I can’t.

I’m not arguing that my husband’s pizza is health food. It isn’t. It’s a processed food. It’s not a banana or an apple or kale for that matter, but it’s still recognizable as food to our bodies. The stuff that we are all now consuming, and our kids are consuming at an alarming rate, isn’t. Your mind can’t picture what some of the ingredients widely used in 67% of kids’ diets look like and your body isn’t quite sure what to do with some of them either. They are more than just processed. They are ultra-processed.

A New Nutrition Classification

That’s why in 2009, a new nutrition classification system, called NOVA, put ultra-processed foods into its own category.

We have to be able to name a thing as a first step in figuring out what to do about it, so NOVA groups foods into four categories:

• Category 1 is made up of foods that are unprocessed or minimally processed. Unprocessed foods are eaten as nature gives them to you—an apple, banana, or kale. If you take the kale and bake it into chips, you’ve processed it, but minimally (it’s still basically kale).
• Category 2 is made up of what are called processed culinary ingredients like oil or salt. Nature does not give us oil or salt directly. We have to make them from basic starting points (pressing olives in the case of oil and grinding whatever it is that salt comes from—rocks? The sea?). They should be used sparingly to enhance the flavor of Category 1 foods.
• Category 3 foods are processed foods. It generally is how we have historically preserved food to last a bit longer. Bread and pasta are processed. Real cheese and yogurt are processed. The ingredients used to make them have to go through a few steps to get to their final stage, but they are essentially still wheat or milk.

Category 4 are the ultra-processed foods. NOVA says these are made up of: substances that are of “rare” or of “no culinary use” or are “additives whose function is to make the final product sellable, palatable and often hyper-palatable. Food substances of no or rare culinary use, employed in the manufacture of ultra-processed foods, include varieties of sugars (fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, ‘fruit juice concentrates’, invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose, lactose), modified oils (hydrogenated or interesterified oils) and sources of protein (hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein, and ‘mechanically separated meat’). Classes of additives used only in the manufacture of ultra-processed foods, are flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, artificial sweeteners, thickeners, and foaming, anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, gelling and glazing agents.”

Category 4 foods are the culprit in many diet-related diseases…

Here’s what I want to communicate clearly—Category 1 foods are best, but Category 2 and 3 foods are fine as long as we don’t go crazy with them. Category 4 foods are the culprit in many diet-related diseases and now we can identify them (at least when we have access to the list of ingredients).

What’s the next step?

Well, according to the JAMA study, in the past 20 years, there was a notable DECREASE in the consumption of sugary beverages by kids. This is probably due to numerous campaigns to steer kids away from sodas. So, we know how to make our diets healthier and it’s not just about avoiding fast food. Ultra-processed foods are in pricier restaurants too. They are in our school cafeterias and in our homes, though the JAMA article notes that the more we eat at home, the less ultra-processed foods we tend to eat. If we can put them in, we can take them out. We didn’t always eat ultra-processed foods. They are a relatively recent invention. Like sodas, we can learn to limit them or cut them out entirely. NOVA means “new” in Portuguese and it’s a good, new way to think about what we eat this year.