What to Understand About the Modern State of Food with the Book of the Month – The Dorito Effect

Hello best life seekers!

Are you interested in improving your diet and overall health? When trying to decide what’s healthy and not, what’s nutritious and what’s junk, check out The Dorito Effect by Mark Schatzker, a great exposé on the modern food industry.

In this day and age of additives, preservatives, GMOs, high fructose corn syrup and natural and artificial flavors – let alone the way food is raised and produced – we have a lot to learn in this buyer beware environment that is the state of modern food.

While The Dorito Effect may shock and alarm those who have never looked beyond the calorie count of whatever they’ve purchased, it will also offer insight to those who have delved into the machinations of how food gets to our plate and what it does to our bodies.

I’m not one for doom and gloom – and there’s plenty to be gloomy about food as The Dorito Effect clearly and entertainingly spells out. I’m for an educated individual who has the knowledge and tools to seek out nutrition and health. In this respect, The Dorito Effect delivers the goods by outlining how the modern food industry has achieved marvels in yield to feed the growing world population but in doing that and chasing profit has neglected and manipulated flavor, a key harbinger of nutrition in what we consume. The Dorito Effect shows how modern farming and industry processes:

• Dilute the natural nutritional content of grown food by 20-50% in the search for yield and profit;
• Add in flavor via chemicals to all sorts of products to restore flavor to a now flavorless product;
• Add fake flavoring to products to trick our minds and sucker us into eating something that isn’t at all nutritious; and
• Use natural and artificial flavors to make us eat more than we naturally would.

Over the past 50 years, everything we grow is becoming bigger and cheaper but blander than ever. Technology allows us to recreate in the lab the very flavors that have been lost on the farm and by doing so, completely transformed what and how much we eat. This interferes with the highly sophisticated chemical language our tongues, nose and brain have evolved to decipher in order to guide our nutrition. These flavors recreated in the lab fool that system into thinking we’re eating something good for us.

Think about strawberry poptarts for a moment. They contain not one bit of strawberry but they have the strawberry flavor we crave. The sugar then hooks us but it’s not like the industry can sell us sugar-flavored treats. No, we need flavoring on that sugar to make it palatable and tasty. The industry does this with most foods. We’d be better served just eating the item that contains the original flavor. Like strawberries.

We have our hands full juggling our lives, careers and families. Eating shouldn’t require a PhD in chemistry but these days it sure seems like it does. The Dorito Effect easily and handily tells us where things are going nutritionally wrong while written in a journalistic style that delights and amuses. The book also helpfully offers insights into better eating selections and ways out of the nutritional desert of modern food.

Being prepared and forearmed is useful if you want to eat healthy or you want your family to have the best nutrition. While The Dorito Effect sounds the alarm on the shocking ways the food industry deceives us to our ill health, it also reaffirms some of what we already know about the root of good health:

Eat real food, mostly fruits and vegetables – foods your great-grandmother would recognize – and leave the shelf food on the shelf.

But there’s a dire caveat to this. Even foods your great-grandmother would recognize no longer taste the same. And, as The Dorito Effect points out, are no longer as nutritious. Chicken tastes less, well, chickeny. Even Julia Child and other cook book writers noted this over 50 years ago when they lamented the growing flavorless nature of meat that tasted like teddy-bear stuffing and needed dressing up with sauces, herbs and other flavorings when these foods used to be naturally flavorful in themselves. Ever wonder why that bright red tomato in the supermarket tastes like tap water?

Unfortunately, even our “real foods” like fruits and vegetables or whole grains or fresh meats have been manipulated. And I’m not talking just GMOed. Eating fresh is only part of the battle now that food has been bred to be bigger at the expense of flavor and nutrition. Few large-scale farmers – from the tomato grower to the chicken raiser – are breeding for flavor. Instead, they want yield and foods that can withstand shipping. Nothing is picked ripe and thus doesn’t have the full store of nutrients we need. Nor does it have the flavor of its ancestors. And without flavor, we hardly want to eat the foods that are more nutritious than the now artificially flavored processed foods that our taste buds love.

This all makes eating for health even more trying than before.

Read The Dorito Effect to see where we are with food. It will shock, disturb and entertain you. Hopefully it will also motivate you to take a closer look at how you shop and spur you to eat healthier. As a society, this journalistic exposé can get us to demand more nutritious foods from our grocery stores and their suppliers. As The Dorito Effect points out, signs of a nascent tidal shift are fomenting. Such change takes awareness of the current predicament. Only then can we move forward toward total health.

Order your copy now of The Dorito Effect.

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