The Secret of Healthy Eating
Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,
Among my many quirks, I happen to love diving into long, dense articles in scientific journals about the metabolic pathways taken by the foods we eat — and the health consequences that result.
But you, unlike me, probably have a life.
So today, I’d like to share something brilliant and brief.
I found three sentences that come as close to revealing the secret of healthy eating as any prose triplet I’ve ever seen.
They are from a fantastic book called The Paleo Cure by nutrition writer Chris Kresser.
Here they are:
- Your body needs about 40 different micronutrients [vitamins and minerals] for proper physiological function; suboptimal intake of any of them will contribute to disease and shorten life span.
- Unfortunately, nutrient deficiency is widespread in people following an industrialized diet that is energy dense but not nutrient dense.
- Vegetable oils and sugar contribute to about 36 percent of the calories in a typical American diet, yet they are essentially devoid of micronutrients.
Simple, no? Yet each sentence reveals a profound truth.
Taken together, they lead to an inescapable conclusion: The most important single step you can take toward optimizing your diet for health is to make each mouthful of food you consume as nutrient dense as possible.
Why is this so vital?
Well, the fact is that even “natural, unprocessed” foods available today offer far less nutrient density than their wild counterparts with which we evolved.
Jo Robinson, author of Eating on the Wild Side, discovered, for example, that cherry-sized wild apples are astoundingly rich in nutrients. But by the time breeders created modern apples from them by relentlessly optimizing for size, sweetness, and other traits, the apples had only 1/400th the amount of antioxidants they had when they were wild.
Hunter-gatherers in Nepal still eat those wild apples.
We don’t.
So day in and day out, it’s crucial for those of us without access to wild foods to select the most nutrient-dense foods in the store, and to stay away from foods that are deficient — or even devoid — of nutrients.
This means eating:
- Dark-colored vegetables and fruits (kale is better than iceberg lettuce; blueberries are better than white-fleshed apples)
- Wild-caught fish, especially salmon
- Grass-fed beef (be sure it is both grass fed and grass finished, as most cattle spend their final days fattening up on corn in a feedlot)
- Free-range chicken and pastured eggs.
And staying away from added sugar and vegetable oils such as soy, corn, canola, and safflower oils.
Heed the wisdom in Kresser’s three sentences. Eat for nutrient density. You’ll be well on the way to optimal health for yourself and your family.
Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions
