Healthy Food – Eating for Life – 6 Simple Rules
Finding healthy foods, eating them, and living a long life because of them is not science fiction. However, it is science. Everyone tries to give you advice on how to eat right, but the simple fact is that hardly anyone understands what happens inside your body when you buy healthy food and eat it. The detail on the subject is available for people who have 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 stops to think what that means about healthy foods. Eating food that wasn’t grown in a lab and taken apart and put back together, that’s what it means. So no dehydrated-rehydrated potatoes, no homogenized milk, no flour, no sugar, and no corn syrup, high fructose or otherwise.
2) Eat foods as close to their natural state as possible. This sounds a lot like “eat whole foods,” but it’s a supplemental rule. Your foods should not only be whole, but they should also be fresh and cooked as little as possible. For millions of years, humans ate what they hunted and gathered without the benefit of stoves and ovens, much less food processors and blenders. Evolution hasn’t had a chance to ‘catch up’ with modern appliances: we still digest food the same way our ancestors did. This is not to say “don’t cut up the red peppers” or “don’t eat cheese because it’s not raw milk.” These are still healthy foods; eating them is fine. Just eat your vegetables barely steamed or your meat almost too raw. Your body will get much more of them, you will feel the difference.
3) Don’t eat anything you can’t buy. Meaning, if you can’t buy a bag of pure sodium erythorbate or a tablespoon of hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, you shouldn’t eat anything that contains those ingredients. It is not healthy. Eating food should fill you up with ingredients created by nature, not by a lab.
4) There are only 2 food groups: things that move and things that grow. In other words, if it’s not obviously a plant or animal, don’t eat it. You should try to eat equal amounts of each of the two food groups, and each has an additional rule to pay attention to:
5) From the “things that move” food group, you should strive to get equal amounts of fat and protein. This goes directly against the ‘fat is bad’ propaganda of the day, but it can be shown to be true.
6) From the “things that grow” group, you should deliberately eat as many different colors of plants as possible every day. Plant colors are formed due to different substances in the plant; each substance represents a group of nutrients. Your body gets its nutrients from meat, but not as many as it does from fresh fruits and vegetables, so it’s important to get a variety – you don’t want to overload yourself with some nutrients and leave others out—that’s not eating healthy food.
These rules are easy to read, but they are hard to follow. It helps a lot to understand food in a way that makes your body love you. Many factors, from social to chemical, conspire to keep you eating a high-carb, highly-processed American diet, but that leads to American midlife rife with diabetes, heart disease, infertility and impotence, and even cancer. Eating healthy foods can keep you alive and feeling good.