Eat Naked
Unprocessed, Unpolluted and Undressed Eating for a Healthier, Sexier You
Margaret Floyd’s new Eat Naked: Unprocessed, Unpolluted and Undressed Eating for a Healthier, Sexier You will, at the very least, make you rethink your relationship with food even if you’re already eating a somewhat healthy diet.
Consider this startling and stomach-churning passage about the perils of drinking homogenized milk, attributed to author Nina Planck: “After pasteurization, dead white blood cells and bacteria form a sludge that sinks to the bottom of the milk. Homogenization spreads this unsightly mass throughout the milk and makes it disappear.”
Gulp. And if you favor a sweet treat every once in a while, you might want to avoid her chapter on naked sweeteners. (Hint: In 1900, the average person ate ninety pounds of sugar a year. By 2008, that figured had doubled.)
Floyd, a nutritional therapy practitioner and certified holistic health counselor, defines “naked” food as food that is whole and unrefined, organic, fresh and in season, and grown locally. Unfortunately, eating “naked” sometimes means eating outside one’s budget, and Floyd does a good job addressing that pesky little fact, prioritizing which whole foods readers should spend their dollars on.
Raw, organic, grass-fed, free-range, natural—Floyd demystifies all of today’s healthy eating labels and backs up her thoughts with copious amounts of research (four pages of cited works). Once in a while, however, she throws in an unattributed passage like “By eating whole foods … the weight can shift of its own accord, without dieting.” Some readers might take that as law, while others might want a little more credible research.
Floyd shares tips on where to find “naked” food, as well as how to organize one’s kitchen and shop “naked.” More than forty recipes—chock full of veggies and lots of raw ingredients—round out the book, as does a refreshing chapter on how to “not” eat naked: In a soul-baring moment, Floyd admits how she sometimes craves macaroni and cheese out of a blue box, and how she ate loads of it while on deadline for this book, sitting on the couch and eating it with a wooden spoon right out of the pot.
While it can at times border on preachy (think Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), the book is fun and filled with many useful facts about our industrialized food pipeline and how readers can begin to claw their way to saner, safer food.
Reviewed by
Dana Rae Laverty
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
