Confused about what to eat? How many diets have you been on? Paleo, Weight loss, Vegetarian, 5:2 and Raw food diets are trendy right now and over the years we have seen some good, bad and pretty scary diets.
The Grapefruit Diet, also know as the Hollywood Diet was born in 1930. The popular low-cal plan called for eating grapefruit with every meal. In the 1950s there was the Cabbage Soup Diet which promised you could lose 5-7kg in a week by eating a limited diet including cabbage soup every day.
Then there was Slim Fast, Atkins, Zone, Ketogenic, Macrobiotic, South Beach and Lemon Juice Diets which were accompanied with “diet products” by the same name.
It’s confusing right? How do you determine what is a fad and what we are meant to eat?
Firstly, begin with a better understanding of your current food choices.
- What governs or inspires your food choices? Upbringing, spiritual or health reasons? Because it’s on the supermarket shelf? Be a label-reading detective. Just because the packet or advertisement says it is free of cholesterol, salt, sugar, gluten or it has been enriched with synthetic nutrients, at the end of the day it is food that has been altered. If processing has stripped something out and enriching or fortification adds something back then it isn’t real food.
- Do you know what we have evolved to eat? We are omnivores, we are a species designed to eat both plants and animals as our primary food source.
- Why do you eat? For sustenance and health, or for emotional reasons; distraction, boredom, anxiety, depression, indulgence, punishment, reward, do you eat just because you have to or for comfort?
- How do you eat? With time, respect and gratitude? Or on the run, skipping meals, or chewing food quickly with out consciousness or connection?
- How do you feel after a meal? Satiated, emotionally balanced, easy, calm digestion. Or hungry, bloated, lethargic and uncomfortable?
Secondly, differentiate between diets for weight loss, eating for a disease state eg high cholesterol AND whole food human nutrition – what we are designed to eat.
Weight loss diets are essentially trendy. Past diet regimes confirm this. They come and go because they are not sustainable. Their goal is to achieve a single outcome – weight loss and maybe better health.
Eating for a disease state is not a solution. For example, eating a low fat diet for obesity. Is eating too much fat really the underlying problem? Aren’t there good fats that contribute to healthy fat digestion, metabolism and satiety? And isn’t fat essential for brain, nerve and hormone health? What about sugar turning into fat? Consider the underlying cause of disease. It could be caused by an imbalance in diet or caused by stress, genetics or environment.
Nutrition is the science that interprets the interaction of nutrients and other substances in food eg antioxidants, in relation to maintenance, growth, reproduction, health and disease of an organism. It includes food intake, absorption, assimilation, biosynthesis, energy metabolism, catabolism and excretion.
Dietitians and Nutritionists apply the art and science of human nutrition to help people understand the relationship between food and health and make dietary choices to attain and maintain health, and to prevent and treat illness and disease. They use Government Guidelines and the Food Pyramid to support their recommendations.
The Food Pyramid was developed to provide a simple guide to planning the types of foods we should eat and in what proportions different foods should be consumed. The pyramid represents food from the core food groups only such as meat, fish, chicken, eggs, nuts, bread, cereals, vegetables, legumes, fruit, milk, etc. But did you know this?
The food pyramid was introduced by the US Department of Agriculture in 1992. Sounds like a marketing tool to me! This is why we saw 6-11 servings of rice, bread, pasta and cereal recommended as the main staple for our diet. Fats, oils and sweets were lumped together at the top and we were told that they should be eaten sparingly.
But here’s the clincher……..
Is anyone considering the source and processing of food? It affects the health of food: plants and animals, environment and ultimately earth, which in turn creates food rich in nutrients or empty calorie foods. And it affects what is on offer… an abundance of food full of industrialized ingredients such as sugar, wheat, and corn or what we have evolved to eat.
The answer is yes!
Source and processing of food is being considered because years of conventional food farming have resulted in damage to our environment, animals, plants and our health.
- Soil and water pollution. Rain and irrigation can lead to agrochemical run-off, which contaminates waterways and causes adverse impacts on aquatic ecosystems as a result of toxic effects.
- Soil and land degradation is caused by human mismanagement of soils, mostly due to agricultural activities including the use of agrochemicals used in farming.
- The use of oil is essential to modern agricultural practices. Oil is used in the pumping of water for irrigation, the machinery used on the farm and the long road of transport from the farm all the way along the supply chain to our plate. Oil is so interlinked with our food system that the price of food is closely correlated to the price of oil. Oil prices are a key contributing factor to the increase in the price of food.
- Conventional agriculture favours growing large mono-crops of single food varieties, dramatically reducing the biodiversity of the food we eat. Humans are increasingly vulnerable due to the loss of food biodiversity. If a pest or disease invades a monocrop then the risk is that the entire crop will be lost.
The current model of food has failed us.
We still suffer from disease and ill-health even though we follow institutional disease prevention guidelines. So we try fad diets, supplements, medications and stimulants such as caffeine and recreational drugs to prop up health. These are only temporary solutions until the body pushes you to have a forced rest or illness. Supplements are not a replacement for food and do not offer an insurance against disease. In a society where we have an abundance of food we still find ourselves nutritionally deficient in common nutrients such as iron, vitamin D, zinc and magnesium, even though food is fortified. The solution is in the source and processing of our food.
In summary:
- Eat what we are designed to eat. Our anatomy and physiology dictates this. A modern hunter-gatherer, which is what we are, is meant to eat a diet rich in fresh, whole foods. Vegetables, fresh and cultured, whole fats and proteins from healthy pastured animals, non farmed seafood, some well prepared nuts and seeds, small amounts of seasonal fruit and whole unprocessed cultured dairy. We are addicted to carbohydrates, particularly wheat, soy, corn and sugar because every convenient, ready to eat food is made of them. They are made available to us in absolute abundance because of mono cropped industrialized farming and are often genetically modified as well. Carbohydrates are addictive because they are essentially sugar. We are also addicted to chemically processed vegetable oils and fats found in the same ready to eat foods. I recommend eating organically grown low starch vegetables as your main carbohydrate source and whole, unprocessed fats and oils sourced from healthy plants and grass fed animals.
- Source well. Eat what we can grow, raise, hunt and gather naturally in nature. If we farm, we must farm to encourage valuable, rich nutritious soil to grow our food, nurtured soil is full of life and full of nutrients. Anything that doesn’t support that, doesn’t support health. That is how we know what to eat. Meat from grass-fed animals has two to four times more omega-3 fatty acids than meat from grain- fed, feed lot animals. So let’s support and buy our food from farmers that support this natural system, one that works and flows with nature, the health of our animals, plants, environment, seasons and climate. Eat seasonally, eat locally (to the best of your ability) but most importantly eat fresh, whole unprocessed food.
- Prepare well. Look to our ancestral and cultural food preparations and traditions. The lost art of food preparation has occurred because we live in a fast paced society with convenience as a preference. Preparing food well preserves food, increases nutritional density and food is better digested and assimilated. Always cook food below 120 Celsius. Eat raw when suitable or soak, ferment, marinate and sprout to assist digestion and optimal absorption of nutrients.
Eat what is good for you, good for all, good for our flora and fauna and for our earth. Eat beyond the self… eat well for all.
The following are some great resources to get you on your way…
