You know the old saying - one person's food is another person's poison - really is true. We are all different, and because of these differences, there is no ideal healthy diet that is optimal for everyone. On the other hand there are definitely some aspects to diet that we all need and some aspects that can be less than optimal for everyone's health.
Many people eat simply to stop the hunger pangs and to enjoy the pleasure of eating, with little thought about what the body needs to stay healthy. Convenience and cost also play a large role in what people eat. In our fast-paced society many people are in a hurry and want their food quick, convenient, and cheap. Hence the rise in popularity of "fast food" including fast food restaurants and fast microwave convenience foods. Most people have a vague notion of what might be healthy, primarily based on the constant barrage of advertising, mainly for fast cheap convenient foods. But much of this advertising is intentionally misleading to sell products. Consequently, many people have become brainwashed into believing that some fast foods are actually "healthy choices". Most of these foods are not so bad that they will quickly make you sick - or they wouldn't sell and would soon drop out of the market. But most of these factory processed-packaged foods are loaded with flavor enhancers and even addicting chemicals to entice and capture customers, often at the expense of their long-term health. They also have lost many of their nutrients during processing and are loaded with chemicals or ingredients that make them less expensive - but are not good for optimal health.
So what are the additives that are likely to be harmful to everyone's long-term health? They include flavor enhancers like monosodium glutamate (MSG) and addicting refined sugar, cheap oils full of rancid polyunsaturated omega-6 fats and/or trans-fats, food colorings, processing additives and conditioners that make foods cheaper to mass-produce, and preservatives to extend shelf-life. These are the ingredients that make fake convenience foods cheap and make them look and taste more like real food so they sell, but at the expense of our long-term health. So, the moral to this story is simple: it's time to get back to eating real food.
What nutrients do we need from our food? We all know about vitamins and minerals. So, why not just take a multi-vitamin and mineral supplement and be done with it? One good reason is that most multi-vitamin and mineral supplements are made from refined chemicals that often may not be properly absorbed or utilized to fill our nutrient needs. Our bodies have evolved to absorb and utilize complex matrices of nutrients from foods, not refined or artificial nutrient analogues from pills. It is also likely that science has not yet discovered all of the healthful nutrients in foods nor all of the synergistic effects of natural nutrients working together. So, what is packaged for convenience in a pill is not likely to fully meet our nutritional needs.
A better approach is to look at diets of healthy people around the world to look for foods that favor health. We can also look for dietary factors that are detrimental to health. The classical work of
Weston Price is a good start. He searched around the world to find people eating their native diets and compared their health to that of their contemporaries who had switched to canned and processed commercial foods loaded with refined flour and sugar that were becoming popular in the early 1900's. He consistently found that the people who continued to eat their native diets were healthier than those who switched to more modern commercial diets. He found that the healthiest groups included animal seafoods, and/or organ meats, and/or dairy in their diet. He also found that these people ate a wide variety of plant foods and prepared them in ways that optimized their health benefit. These are the foods that should be the foundation of a healthy modern diet. The challenge today is to find these foods uncontaminated by modern pollution.
Ideal FoodsBuy local foods to help preserve our environment and keep it clean. Buy organic foods to help keep our environment and foods free of pesticides. Buy wild animal foods from clean environments or foods from pastured animals that are humanely raised without antibiotics or hormones and fed natural organic diets. Avoid large fish, which accumulate methyl-mercury from the food chain, and minimize or eliminate factory-farmed animal foods. Include fatty fish and shellfish or organ meats or dairy depending on which of these foods are most appealing and well tolerated. Avoid all processed dairy and choose raw, cultured, and fermented dairy if tolerated. Make
bone broth to use in soups, stews, and gravies. Choose a variety of organic vegetables and fruits to suit your taste and appetite. Include some lacto-fermented vegetables if they are tolerated. Grow your own foods if possible. Include whole-grain foods and small amounts of nuts if they are appealing. Soak or sprout grains, nuts, and seeds for optimal nutrient availability. If you are overweight, avoid starchy/sugary vegetables, grains, and fruits.
Use your senses to judge the quality of real foods. If a food is not appealing, don't eat it. Also notice how you feel after eating foods and avoid those foods that do not leave you feeling well. But don't trust your senses to judge the quality of deceptive fake foods - avoid them as much as possible.
To make sure that you are getting a balanced diet, you can use
online nutrition calculators or if you have Excel you can try my
Dietary Nutrition Calculator to estimate your dietary nutrient intake. These estimates are crude at best, because of the sometimes large variability of some nutrients in foods and because of the variability in how well these nutrients are absorbed and utilized from one individual to another. But at least you can get a rough idea if your diet is providing adequate nutrients for good long-term health.
Taking the time and effort to find and prepare good quality food is a worthy investment for health. What better investment can you make?
I saw some video segments from 60 Minutes on Yahoo News this morning that are very informative about happiness. They are interviews of Tal Ben-Shahar, a Harvard psychology professor and lecturer. The link below will bring up the Yahoo News video player and should play the videos (and a few commercials :) automatically in succession:
