Finding healthy food, eating it, and thereby living a long life is not science fiction. However, it is science. Everyone tries to give you advice on eating right, but the simple fact is that almost no one understands what’s happening inside your body when you buy and eat healthy foods. Details on this topic are available for the people who need to know. Those of you who want the simple rules with no fluff or details, read on.
1) Eat whole foods. People say “whole foods” all the time, but no one thinks about what that means about healthy eating. Food that wasn’t grown in a lab and wasn’t disassembled and reassembled, that’s what it means. So no dehydrated-rehydrated potatoes, no homogenized milk, no flour, no sugar and absolutely no corn syrup, high fructose or otherwise.
2) Eat foods as close to nature as possible. This sounds a lot like “eat whole foods” but it’s a supplementary rule. Your food should not only be whole, but also fresh and undercooked as little as possible. Millions of years people ate what they hunted and gathered without stoves and ovens, let alone food processors and blenders. Evolution didn’t have a chance to “catch up” with modern devices: we still digest food the same way our ancestors did. This is not to say “don’t chop your peppers” or “don’t eat cheese because it’s not raw milk”. These are still healthy foods; eating them is okay. Just eat your vegetables barely steamed or your meat almost too raw. Your body will get so much more out of them, you will feel the difference.
3) Don’t eat what you can’t buy. That said, unless you can buy a bag of pure sodium erythorbate or a dollop of hydroxypropyl methelicellulose, you shouldn’t be eating anything containing those ingredients. It is not healthy. Food should fill you up with ingredients created by nature, not a lab.
4) There are only 2 food groups: things that move and things that grow. In other words, unless it’s obviously a plant or obviously an animal, don’t eat it. You should try to eat roughly equal amounts of each of the two food groups, and each has an additional rule to watch out for:
5) From the “things that move” food group, you should aim to eat roughly equal amounts of fat and protein. This goes squarely against the “fat is bad” propaganda of the day, but it’s demonstrably true.
6) From the group of “things that grow” you should consciously eat as many different colors of plants as possible every day. Vegetable colors form due to various substances in the plant; Each substance represents a group of nutrients. Your body gets nutrients from meat, but not as much as from fresh fruits and vegetables, so it’s important to vary it – you don’t want to overload some nutrients and skip others, it’s not a healthy diet.
These rules are easy to read but difficult to follow. It helps so much understand food in a way that makes your body love you. Many factors, from societal to chemical factors, conspire to push you to eat a high-carb, highly processed American diet — but what this means is that the American lifestyle is becoming more at risk of diabetes, heart problems, infertility and impotence and even cancer is plagued. A healthy diet can keep you alive and feeling great.
Thanks to Michael Danielson
