Many supermarket shelves and diet books are guilty of reducing foods to a simple caloric number yet food is much more than a just a measure of potential energy.
Food is also a source of nutrition which crucially provides all the building blocks and raw materials your body needs to successfully fire on all cylinders and be healthy. Regardless of calorie content, foods with less nutrition are typically less healthful than those with more nutrition.
What determines the quality of the nutrition in your food? Simple, the quality of nutrition in the food your food ate. It is an obvious (and harmonious) cycle which worked well until large-scale industrial food processing entered the picture and needed things bigger, faster and cheaper.
As my slightly cross-eyed friend in the picture below demonstrates an egg is not just an egg. One of his eyes comes from an outdoor-reared chicken another from an indoor-caged chicken. Can you guess which is which?
Whilst both cartons rightly claim to contain eggs, due to the differing nutritional content, they are effectively housing different foods.
So a simple rule to bear in mind when patrolling your local food store - eat animal foods derived from animals which have themselves been healthy.
Plants eat too so the same rule applies. A healthy soil unsurprisingly equals a healthy and more nutritious plant. A win win for you and the environment.