Whole New Diet

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Even though health-conscious consumers have learned to shop cautiously, a close inspection of America's cupboards reveals that even the savviest of shoppers aren't necessarily eating better. Highly processed foods are still successfully marketed as healthy alter-natives, and for every study showing the benefits of a particu-lar piece of produce, there's an ambitious industrialist ready to extract, refine, and repackage the nutrient du jour (pomegranate smoothie, anyone?). Our food culture can even take a well-known health food like soy and transform it into a danger.

The reality, hard to digest amid all the preservatives and additives, is that a truly healthy diet is not only balanced but also whole, right down to the basic ingredients in our pantries. "I grew up and still live in the San Francisco Bay area. It's a place where farmers' markets have a real impact on many chefs and home cooks," says Heidi Swanson, author of Super Natural Cooking (Ten Speed, 2007). "But I started seeing that many of my everyday 'foundation' ingredients, the ones used to support the good stuff from the farmers' market, were heavily processed: nutritionally barren flours and grains, refined sugars, nut butters made from sprayed crops, and industrially produced cooking oils."

Swanson set out on a mission to revamp the building blocks of her diet and documented the transformation at her website, 101Cookbooks.com. "I started by gradually overhauling my pantry, and it immediately opened my eyes to a whole world of exciting--and completely under-utilized--grains," she says. "I traded standard pasta for noodles made of buckwheat, spelt, and spinach. Getting rid of all-purpose flour paved the way for whole wheat pastry flour, and oat, mesquite, and wild rice flours.

"Many industrial food producers bank on the idea that you aren't going to ask questions, or look under the hood at all, and they take advantage of this," the author says, reminding us of the introduction to Super Natural Cooking, where she writes: "Before these products made their way into your house or apartment, many were showered with agricultural chemicals, treated with chemical solvents, and stripped of most of their vitamins, minerals, fiber, and flavor."

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