Serene Karplus, Nederland. If anyone wants to give me a Porsche tomorrow (or a Honda Odyssey), I promise not to pour soda pop in the gas tank or dark corn syrup in it for oil. They are not the fuel and lubrication the car needs and would damage it beyond repair.

Yet every day we do this to our own bodies, assuming we will magically conjure up the chemistry and energy to heal from this abuse, and that our cells will find a way to repair the damage. Insidiously over the past century, we have begun thinking of chemicals as food. Our bodies have not adapted, and we slowly kill ourselves with toxins we call treats.

Just as we would not feed our cars fluids they can’t use and call it fuel, we need to examine what passes our lips and determine whether it is fueling us or harming us.

Real food is whole, mostly unprocessed, free of chemical additives and rich in nutrients, the way it grows in nature, the way we have eaten it for thousands of years. It provides a huge variety of flavors and nutrients that work together to help us assimilate more of what they offer.

Eating real, whole foods means viewing processed items as man-made junk that is not appropriate fuel. For example, white flour offers empty calories, stripped of the vitamins, minerals, and fiber in the hull, creating a nutritionally devoid substance that processors “enrich” with chemicals.

We need healthy fats for fuel. Unlike trans fats and processed fats, found in partially-hydrogenated oils and spreads which are used in most of our commercial bakery products, most naturally occurring fats are healthy. Oils that are liquid at room temperate are typically healthier than fats that are solid. Good oils include extra virgin olive oil, fatty fish (salmon, herring, sardines), avocados, nuts, seeds and whole-milk dairy.

Many books have been written about the killer, sugar. It slips into almost all processed foods under many different names, some obvious like corn syrup, sucrose and glucose, and numerous others that are less apparent. Avoiding sugar for a couple of weeks, then tasting some lightly steamed broccoli can make us marvel at the sweetness of vegetables. Giving up refined sugars quickly re-sets the taste buds to appreciate the lighter sweetness of real food.

Fruits, vegetables and grains offer sugars we can more readily assimilate due to their inclusion of water, fiber and the naturally occurring enzymes that aid our digestion and absorption of nutrients.

Craving a piece of apple pie? Recognizing that it is mostly fat, sugar and empty calories with a tiny amount of apple, we benefit from an easy switch to simply cutting up an apple, sprinkling on some cinnamon and popping it in the microwave or oven – all of the good flavors and nutrition with none of the harmful parts.

If our own bodies and health aren’t enough of a reason to consume real whole foods, we may want to consider the environment. Eating less processed food, lower on the food chain and locally grown when practical, reduces fossil fuel use, greenhouse gases and packaging that ends up in landfills.

Treating ourselves to wholesome fare provides real fuel for the many intricate systems that manage our bodies and brains. Asking ourselves at every mouthful what benefit we gain for all the work we ask the body to do in sorting the good from the bad, helps us choose more wisely as we fuel all our system’s cells and processes.

(Originally published in the March 21, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)