The buzz right now is all about clean food, which describes foods that are fresh, whole, unprocessed, and often grown in a sustainable way. Because processing foods often strips them of their nutrients and includes adding in unhealthy foods like high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, and additives, making the change to cleaner foods can improve your nutrition and your health. But can it help you lose weight? Tosca Reno, Oxygen columnist and now author thinks so and has released a new book called The Eat Clean Diet, where she recommends giving up processed foods and eating 5-6 low calorie clean meals a day. Diet-Blog has written up a great review of the book, so if you're interested, go check it out!

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Besides improving the nutrition of my and my family's meals, one of my main goals right now is to make those meals as "clean" as possible. Clean foods are those that are grown organically and in a sustainable manner, whether they be fruits and vegetables, fish, or coffee. To reach our goal of a "cleaner plate," we joined a food co-op a little over a year ago, will be regulars at our local farmer's market this summer, and planted our own (tiny) vegetable garden this year so that we can freeze veggies to use during the cold winter months. I've been working to tackle one product at a time to make sure that the foods we eat most frequently come from sources I can feel good about. While we aren't there yet, I've seen a vast improvement in the quality and variety of the food we're eating, and my kids are eating things they would have never touched just a few months ago.

If you're interested in a cleaner plate, here's an excellent slide show for the beginner. It covers basic information such as what exactly "organic" means and how to properly read labels, genetically-modified foods, ocean-safe fish, and how to reduce the amount of packaging in the food you buy. When we were getting started, it was overwhelming, but if you choose just one thing to work on at a time, you'll be well on your way to cleaning up your own plate in no time!

I've linked to The Cleaner Plate Club before, but if you're looking to eat in a more eco-friendly way, Ali's got it all: tons of research, well-written posts, and recipes to boot. Check her out!

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