If you’ve been wondering what I mean when I say that my goal is to help
readers understand the difference between real food and manufactured
calories, then today’s post is for you.

When you make a choice
about what to eat, the question is, “Is this really food, or is it
an invention of the 20th century, i.e., manufactured calories?” 
Sometimes things in life can be divided into black and white, like the
coin toss at the start of a football game.  But sometimes it’s not that
simple.  Occasionally a coin lands on its side.  Between black and
white you find a spectrum of grays.  That’s what I want to talk about
today.  

When you talk about the difference between real food
and manufactured calories, you’re talking about a spectrum of items. 
To show you what I mean, today we’re going to talk about corn.

Corn,
like lots of other real food, originates in the earth, and you can eat
it straight off the cob.  As soon as corn is picked, the sugars in the
kernels begin to be converted to starches, which do not taste as sweet
to our palates.  So I’m not one bit surprised to hear from a friend
that he has fond memories of having eaten uncooked, fresh-picked sweet
corn when he worked on a collective farm years ago.  I’m sure that the
raw foodists would approve.  

One step removed, but still
“real,” as far as I’m concerned, is the same corn, purchased a few days
later from the supermarket, and boiled for a couple of minutes until
bright yellow.  Maybe it’s eaten as is, or maybe the kernels are sliced
off to make Heather’s Snazzy Salsa
or something else equally delicious.  Maybe those kernels are
flash-frozen or canned for consumption some months later.  It still
looks and tastes like corn as we know it, and it’s definitely corn, as
most any 5-year-old can tell you.  Little by little though, we are
moving farther and farther away from the date and place that corn was
picked.

Some of that corn is set aside and completely dried. 
It’s going to be crushed to become corn meal, or flour.  Some of that
corn meal will be made from whole corn kernels, and will retain the
germ and the outer covering.  Some will be “defatted” or “degermed,”
and have its fiber removed.  This process will result in a substantial
decrease in the nutritional value of the corn meal.  In order not to
cause nutritional deficiencies in the large numbers of people who will
consume this kind of corn meal, certain nutrients will be returned in a
process called “enrichment.”  Of course, the corn meal would not have
required enrichment if it had not been stripped in the first place. 
But that’s a conversation for another time.  Anyway, enriched corn meal
is bound, in extraordinarily large quantities, for commercial bakeries, and fast
food and snack food manufacturers all over the globe.  

Corn
meal is used to make corn muffins, corn bread, corn dogs, and other
corn-based products.  An essential ingredient in fast-food
establishments, it is dusted on the top and bottom of hamburger buns to
provide that extra touch of authenticity.  Or something.   And some
corn meal goes to the manufacture of corn chips, which I would venture
to call the mother of all manufactured calories.  Now we have moved pretty far away from the corn that was picked on that long-ago summer day.

[The
whole-grain corn meal, manufactured in comparatively miniscule amounts,
will end up in specialty stores, farmers markets, and the growing
organic food industry.]

Somewhere along the way, an additional
manufacturing stream will be diverted to generate high-fructose corn
syrup, which (since it is much cheaper than sugar) has extraordinary
value as an sweetener in the manufacture of edible products.  Corn syrup solids figure into this equation, too, though I’m not sure where.  I see it frequently on ingredient lists.  I don’t know anyone who keeps a bottle of it in their kitchen.  That’s a sign that we’re no longer in the realm of real food.

So
which products are real food, and which are manufactured calories?  And
which ones should we be eating, and which should we avoid?  

I’m not going to tell you that you can’t eat any corn chips at all.  It’s not like a handful of corn chips is going to
knock out your immune system or anything.  A little bit of enriched
corn meal isn’t going to give you a heart attack, or diabetes.  We can
all handle a little bit of this stuff.  Again, the problem is that
we’re drowning in it.  And that’s a huge problem, really. 

The more processed or manufactured the
item, the more “predigested” it is.  The more predigested, the easier it is to absorb.  And the easier it is to absorb, the more insulin we waste. 

So here are my recommendations: 
Eat more fresh corn and less canned corn.  Not that
canned corn is “bad.”  Just that fresh is better.  Frozen is almost as good, since fresh corn is frozen when it’s relatively newly picked.  Eat more whole-grain
corn meal and less “refined” corn meal.  Or don’t eat any refined corn
meal at all.  Unless of course you’re a guest visiting at someone else’s
house.  I’m a big believer in being
a gracious guest. 

I want everyone to eat
fewer chips and more real corn.  Not because I want you to eat
more corn, but because I want you to eat more real food and less manufactured calories.  Especially corn chips, which have little if any redeeming nutritional value.  Actually, if you need some help
kicking your corn chips habit once and for all, all you have to do is
read David Sedaris’s description of how his mother’s misshapen toenails
resembled the Fritos at the bottom of the bag.  That should do it!
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