What No One Told Me About Food in America
I moved countries and my body changed. It took me a year to work out why — and the answer was written on the back of the packet all along.
By Laura Medina · 7 min read
When I arrived in the United States, I never imagined that something as ordinary as grocery shopping would change the way I think about my own body.
At first I bought what I had always bought. I believed I was eating more or less the way I had eaten in Europe, in Latin America — the same bread, the same sauces, the same weekly basket. And then, slowly, things began happening that I couldn’t explain. I gained weight without understanding why. My skin broke out. Small blemishes appeared on my forehead and stayed there for more than a year.
Every day I asked myself the same question: what is going on with me?
I thought it might be hormonal. I thought I might be ill. I thought it might simply be bad luck — the particular bad luck of a body that has been moved somewhere it doesn’t belong. That last one is worth sitting with, because it’s the story we tell ourselves most easily. Something is wrong with me. Not: something has changed around me.
It took me a long time to turn the question around.
The part almost nobody reads
I started reading labels. Not the front — the back. The list nobody looks at, printed small, at the bottom, in the place a company would put something it didn’t especially want you to see.
We live in an era where marketing sells far more than a product’s actual quality. Beautiful packaging, the words natural, fitness, light, healthy, a photograph of a wheat field at sunrise. All of it is designed to be read instead of the ingredient list. And it works, because the front of the box is written for you, and the back of the box is written for the regulator.
Since then I have paid much less attention to the advertising and much more to what is actually inside.
Bread is not the enemy
Take bread — the most ordinary thing in the world.
Bread, on its own, isn’t the enemy. Traditionally it needs four things: flour, water, yeast, salt. That is a food humans have eaten for thousands of years.
But pick up a standard loaf in an American supermarket and read the back. Enriched wheat flour, high fructose corn syrup, soybean oil, calcium sulfate, calcium propionate, ascorbic acid, azodicarbonamide, soy lecithin. The same product, sold under the same word, in a country where the regulations are different.
I found the same thing with ketchup. The American version listed corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup among its first ingredients. The European version of the same brand: tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, salt, spices.
That was the moment something clicked. The problem often isn’t the food itself. It’s what has been done to it.
The front of the box is written for you. The back of the box is written for the regulator.
What I actually changed
I want to be careful here, because I am not a nutritionist and this is not a plan.
I didn’t start a diet. I started choosing, where I could, foods with shorter ingredient lists — things that stay closer to what they are and don’t need a paragraph of additives in order to exist. Not perfection. Just attention.
Over the following months I noticed my skin improving and my energy steadying. I can’t prove those changes came from the food; bodies are complicated and a hundred things change at once when you change your life. But something shifted, and it shifted in the direction of feeling like myself again.
What I can say with certainty is that something else changed, and that change was permanent: I stopped being a passive shopper.
What eating turned out to be about
The more I read, the more I understood that food reaches much further into us than we tend to think. A healthy gut carries a balanced microbiome that takes part in digestion, supports the immune system, and is in constant conversation with the brain through the nervous system.
You may have heard the popular version of this — that most of your serotonin, the “happiness hormone,” is made in your gut, and therefore your gut controls your mood. The first half is true; the second is a shortcut. The serotonin made in your gut doesn’t cross into your brain — it’s busy running your digestion — and mood is made elsewhere. But the connection between gut and mind is real, just less magical and more interesting: through the vagus nerve, through inflammation, through the microbiome itself.
Which is enough. It doesn’t need to be magic. It’s enough to know that what we eat participates in how we feel.
An honest note
I’m not saying everything sold in the United States is bad, or that everything sold in Europe is perfect. That would be too easy, and it isn’t true.
What I’m saying is that the same product, with the same name, in the same kind of packaging, can be built quite differently in different places — and that nobody is going to tell you which one you’re holding. Reading the label is the one tool you’re guaranteed to have.
I’ll also say the thing that gets left out of most of these stories: eating this way in America can be more expensive, and it takes time most people don’t have. That isn’t a personal failing, it’s a system. My point isn’t that everyone should shop the way I shop. It’s that everyone deserves to know what they’re buying.
What I’m left with
Food stopped being just the thing that stops me being hungry. It became one of the ways I take care of my body and my mind.
I don’t think any of this should be about fear, or about chasing a perfect diet — that’s just another way of handing your peace of mind to somebody else. It’s about learning, questioning, reading the small print, and choosing with your eyes open.
We are responsible for our own health far more than we’re led to believe. And every small choice counts.
Food made with real ingredients, with time and intention, doesn’t only nourish the body. It nourishes the life around it.
Laura Medina writes about food, health and the ordinary discoveries of starting over in a new country.
General reflection, not medical or nutritional advice. If your skin, weight or energy change in ways that worry you, it’s worth seeing a doctor — there are many possible causes, and you deserve a proper answer rather than a guess.
