Making the Difference

Homemade Isn’t Always Healthy

A few honest thoughts about processed food, the unseen choices behind what we eat, and feeding our families with love instead of fear.

When I read Dr. Weston Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, the photographs stopped me cold. He documented what happened to isolated communities all over the world when refined sugar, white flour, and canned goods were introduced into their traditional diets. Within a generation or two, he recorded more crowded teeth, less room for wisdom teeth, narrower jaws and faces, and a sharp rise in tooth decay. 

Whatever else you make of his century-old work, that dental record is striking — and it started me thinking hard about the food I set in front of my own children.

The thought that keeps nagging me

Here’s what I can’t stop turning over: the very things Price called “processed” — refined flour, cane sugar, canned foods — are the things WE tend to call healthy, as long as we make them ourselves. Isn’t that the quiet assumption? If I bake the bread, roll the pasta, whip up the cake and the pudding from “scratch,” it must be wholesome.

But white flour is white flour and sugar is sugar, whether it comes from a box or from my own two hands. “Homemade” and “nourishing” aren’t always the same thing. That single realization changed the way I shop and cook more than almost anything else I’ve learned.

To me, healthy means as close to the earth as possible — raw vegetables, organic fruit, raw seeds and nuts and nut butters, fermented vegetables, raw milk from pasture-fed animals, organic meat from animals raised on grass, free-range eggs. Real food, in something close to the form God made it.

Lonely in the grocery aisle

I’ll never forget the early days after my celiac diagnosis, ten years ago. I’d walk the aisles of the store slowly, a lump swelling in my throat, terrified I’d buy something that would make me sick. I’d been warned about all the hidden places gluten can hide — that even when a label looked safe, there could be cross-contamination, or wheat tucked into an ingredient I’d never suspect.

Down the chip aisle, nearly everything was on my “no” list. I moved to the meat case and picked up package after package, reading the same things over and over — MSG, modified food starch (which can be made from wheat), caramel coloring. The cheese, the sour cream, the yogurt, the pickles — on and on. I couldn’t even buy a pickle unless I found Bubbies brand in the refrigerated section! Between the hidden gluten and the fillers and additives I was trying to avoid, it felt like the whole store was off-limits. Fillers and binders get added to cut costs, and it’s often our health that quietly pays the difference.

“Homemade” and “nourishing” aren’t always the same thing. 

The unseen choices

My husband owns a business, and watching him run it taught me something that stuck. It takes real integrity to buy the higher-quality fittings, cable, and components when your installers are out in the field — the customer staring at the finished product in their living room has NO idea whether you used the good parts or the cheap ones. They can’t see the difference. But it’s there, in how long the product lasts and how well it serves them for years to come.

Those unseen choices showed up in the numbers, too. When we started tracking service calls, almost all of ours came from other companies’ customers — ours simply needed us far less. We were even surprised with a trip to Hawaii from a business partner for having one of the highest customer-retention rates for their product in the country. We were being quietly rewarded for choices no customer ever saw us make.

Food works the same way. It takes integrity “from the top” to make a product with real, more expensive ingredients — one that’s harder to package, needs refrigeration to ship, and has a shorter shelf life. It is so much cheaper and easier to build something for the warehouse than for the body. And in our own kitchens, we’re making those same unseen choices every single day for the people we love most.

Learning to see a little more clearly

I grew up in the country, surrounded by honest, hard-working people, and I assumed the whole world worked that way — that everyone told the truth and had my best interest at heart. I’ll be honest: it took years of running a business (and one memorable airport argument with my husband about the mysterious “they” who supposedly cause all our troubles!) before I understood that not every company is looking out for me.

That’s especially true with food. A lot of what fills the middle of the grocery store is engineered to be irresistible — tuned for the exact combination of sugar, salt, and fat that keeps us reaching for more — while real ingredients get swapped out for cheaper fillers, binders, and artificial colors and flavors. I don’t say that to make you afraid or cynical. I say it so we can shop with our eyes open.

Gratitude, honestly

And here’s the other side, because it matters: I am SO grateful for the men and women who make gluten-free products, who grow organic fruits and vegetables, who use real ingredients in their soups and sauces, and who run health food stores. When we travel and I can’t get to my usual market, finding a good health food store feels like relief washing over me. These are people choosing the harder, costlier, more honest path — and they’ve made my family’s life so much better.

It’s still worth reading labels with a little healthy curiosity. When a package says “organic,” do we know what that certification really requires? When it says “100% juice,” do we know if it’s fresh-squeezed or reconstituted from concentrate? Asking good questions isn’t paranoia. It’s stewardship.

The part I most want to say

Feeding a family well is HARD. It costs money, and it costs time, and it costs energy that a tired mom doesn’t always have to spare. I know this, because I live it.

I once had a dear woman sit in my kitchen and tell me, honestly and vulnerably, how hard and expensive she found it to eat well. In my younger, more fearful years, I’m ashamed to say my first response was to quietly judge — to look at her cart and her family and worry. I’ve grown since then. What that brave woman needed wasn’t my judgment. She needed encouragement, a listening ear, and maybe a simple recipe and a hand to hold while she took one small step.

So if you’re reading this and your cart doesn’t look like mine — please hear me: you are not a bad parent. There is no shame here. Whatever you’re carrying — illness, exhaustion, a tight budget, a picky eater, a hard season — God sees it, and He is not standing over you with a frown. Neither am I. Every family is doing their best with what they have, and children get sick sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone’s choices. Please don’t ever let anyone (including a health blogger!) hand you a burden of guilt over a child’s diagnosis. That is not a load you were meant to carry.

So, where do we start?

We start small, and we start where we are. My cousin has a saying I love: “It is better to have IMPERFECT ACTIVITY than PERFECT INACTIVITY.” You don’t have to overhaul your whole pantry this week. Add one real thing. Swap one processed thing. Read one label. Plant one pot of herbs. Then do it again next week.

Feeding your family closer to the way God made food isn’t about fear, and it isn’t about being perfect or better than anyone else. It’s about love, and stewardship, and the thousand small, unseen choices that add up over a lifetime. Do what you can. Give yourself grace for the rest. And keep going — it’s worth it.

“And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”

 - Galatians 6:9

With much love,

Steffanie

A note on sources: Dr. Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939), for the dental and facial-development observations. On the antiquity of disease: paleopathology has documented cancer and osteoarthritis in human remains going back to the Paleolithic (see the Cancer Research in Ancient Bodies database review, and reviews in The Rheumatologist). On childhood arthritis: juvenile idiopathic arthritis is classified by the Cleveland Clinic, MedlinePlus, and the Arthritis Foundation as an autoimmune disease of unknown cause — diet may help manage inflammation, but does not cause the condition.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This content is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. If you or your child are facing a health condition, please work with a qualified healthcare provider — no diet is a substitute for medical care, and no illness is anyone’s fault.