As promised in an earlier article, we’ve taken a few of your Real Food questions, done some further reading, and tried to provide you with some interesting answers. Some of the questions are combined from multiple questions we’ve received. Read on!

1. Is corn really bad for us to eat? I like corn chips — what’s the problem?

Ramona asked this question here, and it’s a good one. Corn is actually a great, nutritious food. One of the most striking parts of the Omnivore’s Dilemma is that Michael Pollan talks — at length — about corn, and how it’s a near-miraculous food in many ways.

So no — when you’re eating corn on the cob or other foods made from actual corn, there’s no need to worry about getting ‘too much corn’. If you are eating simple, low-ingredient, corn chips (that are not made from processed additives and designed to taste like corn, which many are), then it’s not the end of the world.

The excessive corn products that we’re talking about are everything else that is made from corn, and the fact that a common chicken mcnugget, if you break down all its ingredients, has something like 46% corn product in it (this number jumps around). When you combine that with the amount of corn that the chickens eat as feed, and all the other ways that a diet heavy in processed food contains corn (and soy), it becomes a really imbalanced amount for one food.

This isn’t just “I eat a lot of corn because it’s delicious.” This is finding one particular food in practically everything we consume — corn syrup, MSG, guar gum, xantham gum —the products that can be made with corn (practically any complicated ingredient you can find) are endless.

And one of the most startling facts is that of all the corn that gets sent to be refined and processed into all the different additives, binders, preservatives, and compounds — pretty much none of it is edible. This isn’t peaches & cream corn on the cob you can do up on the BBQ and enjoy with some salt and butter. This is special-variety corn, genetically designed to be processed into just about everything under the sun, and we’re eating huge amounts of it, re-worked and decontexualized beyond all recognition.

2. Do frozen, steamed, boiled, or baked vegetables contain different amounts of nutrients?

Tabby and several other people asked variations on this question. According to most accounts online, yes. Certain nutrients come out when you boil a vegetable, and as such, steaming a vegetable is often considered a better option, as you’re not leaving much in the water.

However, if you take a look at any standard cookbook, there are plenty of recipes in which boiling, baking, or even microwaving vegetables is necessary, and in the end, just the fact that you’re eating vegetables on a regular basis is much better than not eating them at all, just because a steamer isn’t available.

As for frozen vegetables, again, most studies that show any difference in nutrients is so negligible as to be hardly worthwhile. There are plenty of people, online and off, who will tell you differently (and fresh vegetables, in season, grown well, do very, very often taste better), and most frozen vegetables in packages are industrially grown, so if you’re looking to buy well-grown, local produce, frozen is not going to be the first place to look. But nutritionally, the differences in fresh/frozen are negligible when placed next to how fundamentally important it is to just eat these foods in the first place.

If your choice comes down to some frozen asparagus, microwaved, and drizzled with a bit of salt, lemon, and olive oil (something pretty easy to prepare in pretty much any lunch room), vs. a pre-fab meal full of sodium, preservatives, and unnecessary ingredients — by all means, stick with the frozen vegetables.

3. Is organic better than non-organic?

Tabby also asked this one, and we’ve seen it often. This is a very tough question, and one that Michael Pollan even struggles to answer. In the end, his solution seems to be a compromise — organic is often better for us, but not always by virtue of the fact that it adheres to organic guidelines, especially in the USA, where you can buy an organic TV dinner with organic high-fructose corn syrup. Just because something is labelled ‘organic’ doesn’t necessarily make it ‘real food’, and most of the big organic industries are just part of the large, industrialized food system anyway.

Take a look at this great Time magazine article that talks a bit about ‘beyond organic’ — in general, the widespread use of the organic name and the huge-scale implementation of organic farming on an industrial level has shifted the terms of the debate away from this question, which doesn’t really have a yes/no answer.

Many of the real food thinkers suggest that reducing meat consumption, planting a garden, and cooking for yourself, using real ingredients, as much as humanly possible, are things you should be prioritizing above the organic label these days.

More to Come!

You’ve given us more questions than we can answer, but we’ve also seen a great amount of information being exchanged in the comments. We want to encourage this — we’re not food experts either, but we are putting a lot of work into our own diets and healthy lifestyles, and sharing all these developments with you is what we love doing the most, and when others come online and share their expertise with us, we’re thrilled.