Having choices feels good, and options can free us. But in the realm of snack foods, we may have experienced too much of a good thing: more choices than ever before, with more highly-refined, processed foods among them.

Every grocery and convenience store has shelves filled with snacks and prepared foods. Nearly all are made with white flour, refined sugar, and refined vegetable oil—including prepared organic “health” foods—because these ingredients are cheap and have neutral flavors. Out of interest, you might want to take a look at ingredient lists the next time you shop for snack foods. I imagine you will be as surprised as I was to find these ingredients in almost every product sold.

While many people believe that snacks have little place in a healthy diet, they may actually play an important role. Snacks can help you manage hunger and avoid the frantic filling up that often follows denial and the postponement of needs; eating a snack at 4:00 may keep you from eating two or three helpings at dinner. Of course, how we define snack matters. Societal norms have a lot to do with our acceptance of a bag of potato chips or cookies as an afternoon pick-me-up, and relying on hummus and carrot sticks as a mid-morning lift might make us feel almost deviant. Yet these norms are leading us down the weedy path of poor health.

It’s true that we all feel more comfortable when we fit in, gathering food and eating the way others around us do. But if ever there was a moment to call upon your inner renegade, this is it. Our society needs to establish new snacking norms. Until this happens, we may want to set our own rules and live by them: getting rid of empty calories that slow us down and offer little, finding snacks that satisfy us, and enjoying support where we can find it.

To make guacamole, mash a ripe avocado or two. Add lime juice and sea salt to taste. Optional embellishments include chopped tomatoes, scallions, cilantro, or finely-diced chile peppers.

Here is an idea we should all hold dear: It’s possible to enjoy snack foods and, at the same time, control them. We develop this control by learning to see clearly what is on our plate. When we can do this, when we can recognize the organic evaporated cane juice listed on a label as the refined sugar that it is, and when we are able to see what an apple slice with almond butter gives us, our pleasure in snacking will, over time, be enhanced. It will be a deeper, more sustaining pleasure than we’ve known before, if snacking well has been a struggle, because it will be absent the tinge of remorse.

What’s uplifting is that the only method of snacking that will ultimately work is one that’s centered around foods we enjoy. Healthy snacking doesn’t mean denial. So I’d like to suggest a new definition to tuck into your mind and call up when you’re feeling unsure. A snack is a relatively small quantity of food made from ingredients found in nature. A healthful snack will keep your mind alert, your mood up, and your energy high. And in the ideal, it should take little time to prepare.

Here are recipes based on this new definition, and what they have in common is that you can make them in advance. This way they will be within reach when hunger pangs strike.

Roasted Cashews, Tamari Pumpkin Seeds, Homemade Hummus, Pita Triangles

“The truth is so often the reverse of what has been told to us by our culture that we cannot turn our heads far enough around to see it.” Howard Zinn

Change is a norm we have come to accept, and for the food industry change is the lifeblood of profit growth. For growth to continue, the foods we consider healthy, and therefore the foods we most often buy, need to change often. There’s great pressure within the industry for novelty because new products give food manufacturers a competitive edge and increase profits.

Consider some of the popular “health” foods we’re told we need: energy drinks, power bars, probiotic-enriched products, fat-free foods, butter and egg substitutes, processed organic foods, and vegetable oils. There are also popular fad diets that eliminate entire food groups, promise a quick fix, or sell special products you must buy in order to follow the diet.

Reading these examples, you may understandably feel some surprise. But can you see how all of them, the foods and the fads, have been manufactured to replace something real? Can you see how they are all touted to reduce something: weight or cholesterol, hunger or cancer? We are told that eating this way will nourish us and make us look and feel better. We are told there is virtue in making choices like these. If only we believe, if only we agree to open our wallets.

William Coperthwaite wrote these good words:

“Under pressure of marketing…, the average person has little chance of choosing sensibly. The only alternative seems to be to become very self-conscious about food. By this means some few people learn to live healthily, while a great many others go to extremes—all carrot juice, or no bread, or all brown rice and no dairy products.”

If you enjoy the sort of food products listed above, then by all means buy them. But if you consume them because you believe they will move you toward good health or keep you there, feel no regret about passing them over.

Fad foods are the storms of our time. They blow in, create excitement, and stir up energy in the marketplace. We seek cover in food choices that make us feel we’re responding and give us some sense of being in control, but these choices leave us with thinner wallets and without a corresponding increase in vitality.

Overwhelmed by marketing messages, we have lost our familiarity with real food, leaving us to figure out what constitutes a nourishing diet. Yet it’s hard for us to know how to eat well without knowing something about food traditions of the past. While not all of these traditions were good ones, looking back is a way of gaining perspective and avoiding the fads of today: the value-added product fads, the weight-loss fads, the health-nut fads, the measure-every-vitamin-and-calorie fad. To quote the late historian and intellectual Tony Judt:

“We have abandoned not just the practices of the past–this is normal enough and not so very alarming–but their very memory. A world just recently lost is already half forgotten.”

Try, if you can, to remember that our physically-active ancestors ate butter, chicken fat, egg yolks, meat, and full-fat dairy products, all foods that top our forbidden list, to no ill consequence. On the contrary, our rates of chronic disease and obesity have soared since we left these foods behind and replaced them with manufactured substitutes, and the correlation is not likely a coincidence. In part, what made these foods different from the products that are marketed to us today is how the animals they came from were cared for and what foods they ate. There is also the way the land was cared for and how these foods were prepared.

There are people who would have us believe that issues of food and health require a complicated, technical response, and that we need scientists to tell us what to eat, but take a closer look and you’ll see that they all stand to make money by having us believe this. Among nutritionists and physicians who are paying attention, there is a general consensus that corresponds with common sense. And while they may differ on nuance, their overall message is consistent: Eat real food, food that doesn’t change.

You know food is real if you can identify its source and feel confident about what it contains. Real food has no hidden ingredients. It comes mainly from the perimeter of the grocery store and not as much from the middle aisles. Real food can also come from co-ops, farmers’ markets and community-supported gardens. It’s food your great-grandparents would recognize and can generally include meat, fish, whole grains, beans, nuts, seeds, vegetables, fruits, eggs, olive oil, animal fats, whole milk, cream, and butter. Real food is also farmed without pesticides and is free from genetic modification, as it has been for nearly all of human history. And it is best prepared using traditional cooking methods: a saute pan, a pot, an oven.

Doing what a profit-driven food industry tells us to do gives us little credit for deciding for ourselves. It denies us the fun of developing our own ideas, and the stimulation and pleasure of figuring things out, of listening to our bodies and making adjustments until we get it right. There are few food experts who, no matter how sensible or wise, can figure food out for us.

If you need help finding sources of real food for yourself, have a look at some of these links:

For local farms, farmers’ markets or a community supported garden.

For grass-finished meat.

For kosher grass-finished meat.

For local, wild-caught fish, visit your local farmers’ market from spring through fall. For high-quality wild fish and seafood, much of it kosher, try Vital Choice.

For milk, cream, cheese and butter straight from a local farm to you.

For heirloom whole grains and organic flours grown and freshly milled in the mid-Atlantic.

For traditional maple syrup or maple crystals for baking.

For fine or coarse sea salt.

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