Real Food Summit

Many of you who know me, know that in addition to working full time and teaching at VBS last week, I also "attended" the Real Food Summit on-line.

Part of the reason for the Potager out back is that I like eating real food, organic and as fresh and local as possible. You can't get fresher than your own backyard!
But even among the Real Food Summit presenters there are differing opinions.  One would say everyone needs to take supplements, another said if you eat a real food diet you won't need supplements. One would say don't eliminate food groups from your diet, another was a Paleo Diet supporter. One presenter told us to eat a diet that people have eaten for a thousand years, another said we need to eat photo-plankton. Photo-plankton? No thanks.
In spite of all that, I think all the presenters would agree that eating food that has not been processed in modern plants, nor injected with any kind of growth hormone, nor genetically modified, nor fed food it was not created to eat is what we all should be doing.
A few things really interested me, such as Rami Nagel's discussion on how with proper diet we can remineralize our teeth. Small cavity? Take cod liver oil. It was a fascinating topic and had some interesting research.
And the presentation from the US Wellness Meats' founder, John Wood, had some interesting information (did you know that modern field fertilization started when the government had a excess of nitrogen left over from bomb making after World War Two? They discovered the corn produced twice as much. Then they needed to use it. So they began to feed it to cows. So a grass fed animal was now fed a grain diet. Not the best of ideas for the health of the cow - or the meat that cow now made)
I really enjoyed Matt Stone's presentation yesterday. His claim that obesity is an addiction caused by eating foods that increase our dopamine levels made a lot of sense. Real foods are more satiating so we naturally eat less of them, which will, in most people, cause weight loss. But if we eat less of a processed food, we are not satiated causing our brain to think there is a shortage of food and hold on to our weight. His presentation was well balanced and made a lot of sense to me.

So what did I walk away with?
Pretty much the same thing I started with.
I am a big fan of Michael Pollan's "Food Rules": Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.
I would add for those of you who haven't read his little book,  that the food should be organic and local, prepared at home as often as possible and never made by someone who works in a laboratory.
I am more concerned now about the health of my soil, having heard over and over that food grown in soil without micronutrients cannot contain micronutrients. I need to work harder on my compost pile and making sure that the soil has rich material in it, not just organic fertilizer added.

All in all I enjoyed the Summit and felt it was worthwhile. While I couldn't listen to all the presenters (there are only so many hours in a week) I got to hear two a day and felt that it was most worthwhile.