Today, I’ll talk about my lifestyle. In the last few years, I have come to accept food additives. Now I can finally verbalize why, so let’s talk about it.
Avoiding food additives
When I watch YouTube videos about food or health, I often hear this phrase: “Avoid food additives and eat foods only with natural ingredients.”
I also used to do that. There are many food additives in our foods. Especially when I saw many chemical additives listed on the package, I often stopped buying them. And I tried to eliminate these additives as much as possible. I believed that made me healthy.
But in the past few years, I have come to accept many food additives, if they are not in large amounts. And these days, I have been able to verbalize why.
The reason is that natural foods are also toxic, like chemical additives. This understanding made me accept food additives.
Natural foods are also toxic
To explain this, let me talk about my experience. Recently, I learned about fermentation and made fermented foods, such as yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, and fruit vinegar. These foods are processed with bacteria. Thanks to good bacteria, we can preserve food longer. In addition, we can get more nutrition.
Then I noticed that natural things are also toxic in almost all cases, while we are saying “chemical additives are harmful!”
For example, we usually add some heat to our foods. Of course, some vegetables or fruits are edible as they are. But we bake bread, cook rice or beans, and grill meat.
Without it, we cannot eat them in many cases. Some heat reduces toxic bacteria and allows nutrients to be digested and absorbed. In other words, they are harmful when we eat them as they are.
Nature doesn’t care about human lives
I think that many people misunderstand that nature is good for humans. But in my opinion, nature is neither good nor bad for us. Nature is neither our enemy nor our friend.
Nature doesn’t care about human lives. Nature is a far larger existence than such human judgments. For example, this galaxy is only a part of nature, although it is vast. In addition, even 1 million years is only a part of nature’s history. From the perspective of nature, we are such little beings.
And there are a lot of lives, such as bacteria, plants, animals, and humans. They live for their lives. In other words, they were not born to be eaten by humans or any other animals.
So some species evolved to have poison. Almost all plants are not edible to humans or animals. We select and eat a few species of vegetables or grains that we can eat.
We live in such an environment. Nature is only the container of all life. We, humans, are a part of it. Nature doesn’t treat human lives especially.
Eating within the allowable amount
So I stopped focusing on whether the food contained additives. Because not only chemical additives but also natural foods are toxic, more or less.
All foods include some poisons. And we can stay healthy if we eat them within the allowable amount. Thanks to our livers, we can remove these poisons.
In other words, the important thing is the amount of toxicity and balance. Salt is essential for human health, but too much salt will damage our health. Fermented foods would also be healthy, but eating too much of them would harm us.
So I accepted processing food
I also think that not only food additives but also some food processing are necessary for us. We cannot draw the line between natural and artificial. We cook, bake, boil, grill, steam, mix, ferment, dry, or process them under the circumstance that some toxic bacteria can easily kill us. So we can eat safely and healthily.
I ferment foods to preserve my food. Perhaps this means that I process and add some food additives, such as salt and bacteria. And I felt healthier these days.
Of course, overprocessing is also harmful to us. But less processing is also harmful, in my opinion.
So I think that the amount and balance we take matter. Whether the food is natural or artificial, processed or not, both don’t matter.
Conclusion
So I came to accept food additives. Of course, I still avoid processed foods that contain many chemical additives. And I came to cook myself from scratch as much as possible.
But now I care less about food additives than I used to. Because chemical additives and natural foods are both toxic, more or less.
If we understand this logic, we might be able to choose foods more freely.
Thank you for reading this article. I hope to see you at the next one.
