It’s your birthday. Your best friend hands you a beautifully wrapped, basketball-sized box. 🎁 Brimming with excitement and anticipation, you eagerly, yet carefully, untie the ribbon, gently remove the top, and peer inside.
Gleaming in the center of the box is the wristwatch that you’ve wanted for ages. However, the fiery jubilation ignited by your eyes is quickly extinguished by your nose. Surrounding this newly acquired prized possession and filling the rest of the box are small heaps of filthy socks reeking of sweaty feet.
What was your friend thinking? Is this some kind of joke?
We may never know. I’ll leave the rest of the story to your imagination.
The point of this short and somewhat weird tale is that it is a good metaphor for the concept of a food package described by Lifestyle Medicine.
The Food Package Explained
A food package simply means the entirety of a food. It does not indicate one or even a few constituents of a food—it denotes the ENTIRE FOOD AND EVERYTHING IN IT.
This is a critical idea to understand because it is how you should think about everything you put in your mouth.
Take cheese, for instance. Yes, it’s high in calcium, but it’s also loaded with saturated fat. Look only at the calcium content, and you might think cheese is healthy. Step back and look at the entire food package, and the picture changes—sort of like that attractive wristwatch buried in smelly socks.
On the other hand, let’s take a look at fruit. Yes, it contains sugar, but that sugar is naturally occurring and bundled with fiber, vitamins, antioxidants, and minerals. That’s a box worth opening. Refined sugar combined with fats, additives, and preservatives in processed snacks? That’s the junk-filled package that is best left sealed.
Some Words of Wisdom
How do you know if a food package is healthy or not?
Here’s some advice:
- Good advice: Read ingredient labels. Fewer ingredients often (but not always) mean a healthier food.
- Better advice: The healthiest foods don’t even have labels because they are whole foods created by nature—no label needed. Think apples, berries, beans, and broccoli.
- Life-changing advice: Of the foods created by nature, the healthiest for us and the ones we should be eating the most are whole plant foods.
✨ Next time you’re choosing what to eat, think about the whole package—not just the beautifully wrapped box.
If you’re interested in bringing this type of message to a wider audience, I speak regularly on topics related to health and wellness. You can learn more about my talks at https://stevepiriano.life/speaking/
I also explore similar topics more deeply in my books, which you can find at https://stevepiriano.life/books/ if you’d like to dive in.