Choosing Foods: How Do You Know What's Healthy?

By Urgelt from USA

General Principles of Healthy Eating

Beats me.

Really. I'm clueless. There's a lot I don't know about diet and disease. There's a lot science doesn't know.

Science has only the vaguest outline of an understanding of the connection between diet and disease. It has not fully scoped out the consequences of an under supply (or oversupply) for "essential" nutrients.

It's none too certain if the "recommended daily allowances" of "essential" nutrients are close to what's actually needed, or how those needs might vary by age, gender, body weight, activity level, health, or any of a thousand other variables, or if there ought to be other "essential" nutrients on the list.

We have little understanding of the nutritional difference between a nutrient in a naturally-occuring food, and a nutrient added to a food during manufacture. We have almost no handle on the naturally-occuring and human-produced toxins that are in our food and in our environment or how they affect human health.

Our grasp of the biochemistry of human cells is at best preliminary and incomplete. We have very little understanding of the trillions of hitchhikers - bacteria, fungus, mites, etc. - which colonize us and are indisputably having an impact on our health, every one of which has its own nutritional needs which, if met or not met, might influence the health of its host.

This huge gap in scientific knowledge has immediate consequences for every one of us. Because so much is unknown, food manufacturers can get away with murder, both figuratively and literally.

They can sell us foods that will addict us, make us ill, even kill us. And they can fool us, and perhaps even themselves, into thinking that they've done nothing wrong, because there is so much uncertainty in science about nutrition.

The only defense against bad food is knowledge. But knowledge, of the scientifically-verifiable variety, is a scarce commodity. So I've tried to think about the problem of choosing healthy foods by asking, what foods did we evolve eating?

Human beings have been on the planet for perhaps three or four million years (depending on your definition of "human"). For almost all of that time, humans consumed natural foods that they could obtain through hunting and gathering.

Very recently, in an evolutionary sense, humans began to farm selected crops and domesticate some animals, but our genome has not had much time to adapt to these changes.Genetically, we are very little changed from people who lived 300,000 years ago.

There have been a few changes, though. One of the best-studied, and most recent, genetic changes in humans is the acquisition of lactose tolerance beyond infancy.

It's fair to point out, though, that the milk our ancestors adapted to, and what we're drinking today from the grocery store, are very different things. In 8000 B.C., there were no refrigerators, trucks or dairies.

Our ancestors consumed milk quickly, or turned it into cheese or yogurt and consumed that.

Our ancestors did not "Pasteurize" it at high temperature (which induces many, many chemical changes).

Our ancestors did not add chemicals or homogenization agents to milk. Our ancestors did not put milk into plastic containers which are known to leech carcinogenic chemicals into the milk.

Our ancestors did not inject hormones or antibiotics or other drugs into cows, drugs which, if you are wondering, certainly do get into the milk. They did not mix high-fructose corn syrup into it, along with some dark coloring, and call it "chocolate milk."

All of these differences add up. The substance we call "milk" doesn't taste like the milk our ancestors consumed, and it isn't the same, chemically. It's not the substance that we, those of us with the lactose tolerance mutation, are adapted to consume.

Lactose tolerance is a recent adaptation. Most of our genome is older, much older. We are adapted to the foods our distant ancestors ate, food they could find on the ground in season or bring down with a spear or snag out of the river with a net. The problem is, we mostly are not eating those foods. It's not just a problem with milk.

This dietary disconnection between what we evolved to eat, and what we are eating, didn't start in the 21st Century, or even the 20th Century. It's actually been a problem ever since agriculture became the dominant way we feed ourselves.

Take, for example, poor farmers in Southeast Asia living mostly on rice. There have been poor farmers in that part of the world living mostly on rice for thousands of years (which is still very recently, from an evolutionary standpoint). The poorest of them don't get much else to eat.

Rice is a good food, as grains go, but it's not an adequate substitute for a varied, rich diet of leafy vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, berries, root vegetables, wild animal flesh, fish, crustaceans and other sea food, and so on. Their life expectancy sucks if they eat mostly rice. So does their health and quality of life.

Those poor rice farmers are not eating the foods their distant ancestors adapted to, when humans were hunting and gathering wild foods.

Western diets are considerably more varied than those of poor Asian rice farmers. But our diets are dominated by agricultural products which have been refined through industrial processes, to the point where they are, biochemically, vastly different from the food consumed by our primitive ancestors.

So are colorization agents and oxidation inhibitors to make the foods look more attractive. Then they're canned or dried or wrapped in plastic using processes which introduce still more chemicals into the food, chemicals which usually do not exist in nature.

Some of those chemicals are hormone-mimickers, which means that consuming them will alter your hormonal balance, with potentially dangerous results.

The US FDA has approved thousands of food additives to be in the American food chain. European countries have followed suit. Many of these chemicals are proven carcinogens. Many more have never been rigorously studied for health effects. Most were not a part of our ancestors' diets.

Western agriculture is dominated by temperate crops that our distant primitive ancestors rarely or never encountered during their foraging.

Our distant ancestors also did not confine animals from birth in cages so small, they cannot turn around, let alone exercise, in conditions so filthy that the only way to keep them alive is to inject them continually with antibiotics and other drugs.

Most western meat animals do not forage or obtain a varied diet, but are fed monotonously on one or two crops. All of these practices make economic sense; they produce food more cheaply and in great abundance. The food tastes good, too. But is it good for your health?

Not so much.

I think that if you are unhappy with your health - for whatever reason - it's a good time to start thinking seriously about getting those uncertain, sometimes demonstrably dangerous foods off of your table, and replace them with foods your distant ancestors would immediately recognize as good, safe-to-eat foods.

Here are some rules I apply in my own dietary choices.If it can be safely eaten raw, it should be eaten raw. Heating produces chemicals which are not present in natural foods. (Meat is always an exception to this rule, because of the risk of parasites and dangerous bacteria.)

Choose organic foods, as much as your wallet allows. Or grow it yourself.

If it has a label listing ingredients, it means it's been industrially processed and is no longer a suitable food. I try to choose mostly foods that look like they were just harvested - because if they don't look like freshly harvested foods, they aren't.

Freshly harvested foods don't need labels of ingredients, because it's obvious what what they are.

Avoid added sugar in food. Sugar is unbelieveably addictive and incredibly damaging to your health - and yes, that goes for those delicious Christmas cookies or your Mom's wonderful apple pie.

Minimize grains in your diet. (Whole grain rice is probably the best of the lot, but we did not evolve eating a lot of grains, breads, and cereals. Go easy on the grains.)

Generally avoid milk and milk products, unless you're drinking the stuff right out of the cow - preferably, a healthy cow not injected with hormones and drugs. (Of all of the rules I've proposed, I bend this one the most by eating organic yogurt, organic cottage cheese, and organic cheeses. I do have the lactose tolerance mutation; if you do not, you already know to avoid these products altogether, I'm sure.)

Instead, I take a fish oil supplement which has been carefully processed to remove heavy metals and contaminants. According to sources at Harvard Medical School, about 4 grams of fish oil per day should be considered essential in the human diet, and that's backed up by countless studies showing health benefits.

Pursue variety. Don't get into a food rut, because our needs are many, and no food is so broadly nutritious that you can ignore the others. If you're eating the same thing every day, it's probably not a good thing (I make an exception for 4 grams of fish oil).

Don't use temperate-crop oils, like corn oil, safflower oil, or soybean oil. I haven't found any reputable source that can demonstrate that these oils serve any nutritional purpose in humans other than providing raw calories.

To build tissues, such as cell walls, you need saturated fats; these temperate crop oils are worthless for that. When consumed, they also generate food cravings, which is a major reason the food industry switched to these oils back in the 1950's and away from lard and butter. "Bet you can't eat just one." I recommend instead coconut oil, olive oil, oils from nuts and seeds (especially almonds), and butter, all preferably from organic sources.

(Watch your calorie intake, though. These food sources have a lot of calories.)

Emphasize vegetable food sources. Minimizing meat and other animal products makes sense on so many levels, I could write an entire article just about that. More tha 4 oz of meat or eggs per day is overkill. If you do consume meat or animal products, choose organic so you can avoid unhealthy toxins and drugs, and go easy on the stuff.

Don't destroy your quality of life. Make judicious compromises. I make compromises, because if I followed this dietary advice strictly, I'd never again eat an organic burrito or fresh bread or organic unsweetened yogurt with a dollop of added honey.

They're all processed foods my ancestors would not recognize - and I like 'em! Don't take your diet to such extremes that you can no longer enjoy life. Just be aware of your choices, and keep coming back to basics. The foods our distant hunter-gatherer ancestors ate are the foods to which you're best adapted. Stick mostly to those.

So, what do I eat?
There isn't room here to list all of those foods, because I do pursue variety. But I'll list some of the mainstays.

I regularly consume about a dozen different varieties of nuts and seeds with an emphasis on almonds, a dozen different berries and fruits with an emphasis on blueberries (usually frozen, organic when I can get them), dried goji berries, organic raisins, organic unsweetened yogurt, organic cottage cheese, many different organic cheeses, honey, organic muesli, tomatoes, mountains and mountains of brocolli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, spinach, lima beans, and carrots (all raw, mostly organic), other vegetables as they are available or come into season, whole grain rice, bread (but not a lot of it), organic unsweetened nut butters (emphasis on almond), almost a dozen different legumes, dried coconut meat.  

I also have a generous supply of organic canned soups on hand and a freezer full of organic entrees, and yes, those are processed foods. Sue me. Oh, and I should mention the fish oil supplements again, they're important. We need those Omega-3 fatty acids, they're a much bigger deal than most people know.

Once in a while, I eat some organic boiled eggs, a baked potato, a root vegetable, some dark chocolate.

Once in a blue moon, I'll break my diet all to hell and have some Ben and Jerry's ice cream. I enjoy my regular diet and have no regrets about following it, but I have to admit that a rare Ben and Jerry's fling adds enjoyment to my life.

I think we can tolerate some occasional departures from the rigors of an ultra-careful diet. What we can't tolerate is a diet that is one endless lapse, an uninterrupted stream of junk food, processed food, foods altered by heat and chemical additives, foods loaded with sugar and drugs, foods to which we are not adapted. If that's your diet, there's definitely room for improvement.

There will be lots of information on this site and elsewhere about foods to avoid if you are suffering from IBS. Great, that's information you'll need. But as you adjust your diet to avoid those foods, remember that you will never thrive just by cutting bad foods out of your diet. You must include foods that are healthy.

What's healthy? Anything your distant and primitive ancestors could routinely obtain and include in their diets is a pretty good bet.

Bon appetit!

Urgelt is an amateur videographer on YouTube. You can contact him there - just navigate to http://www.youtube.com/user/urgelt , then click on the button which says "send message." He does answer his mail, though not always swiftly.

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