Join me in Eating for Health. Reverse Disease, Lose weight and have more energy by using common sense and eating a natural human diet.
What is a Healthy Diet?
How Do we determine a healthy diet through all the misinformation?
What is a healthy diet really? There is so much misinformation and contradictory information that we are bombarded with daily, it is difficult to discern the truth from the half truths and the outright misinformation. Advertisers have, for decades now, been able to provide misinformation about health in order to promote their products, with a complete disregard for our health. Scientists and Doctors are being bought by industries to deliberately mislead us into believing that we should eat more of this and less of that. So how to we sort through all the lies and find a truly healthy diet?
Our Food system is broken – How do we fix it?
Our food system has become a wasteland of nutrition-less junk, science projects and non-foods that we routinely are led to believe are healthy. So what is a healthy diet really? How do we even determine what is healthy and what is not? Well to start with, we need to look for nutrient rich foods. As we talked about in What is Disease?, a nutrient poor and toxin rich diet leads to disease. So a healthy diet is a diet which is nutrient rich and low in Toxins.
So where do we look for a more nutrient rich diet?
How do we find out what we should be eating?
The best way to sort through all the misinformation and get to the facts is by looking at nature. Animals in their natural habitat eat food which is naturally designed for their optimal health. They don’t eat cooked food, they don’t eat processed foods, they just eat foods as nature intended.
To find our ideal diet we can look at our closest biological relatives in the animal kingdom. The Chimpanzee shares 98.6% of the same DNA as humans. They are our closest ancestors, and while I am not suggesting that we hop into the trees and start eating insects, we can certainly base a healthy human diet off of their example.
Chimpanzee Diets consist primarily of fruits, greens and blossoms, with some seeds, pith, bark and small amounts of insects. Some chimpanzees eat a small amount of meat, the equivalent of about 3% of their total diet or 9 days a year, although not all Chimpanzees eat meat. The meat they eat is raw, fresh and unprocessed, as close to its natural form as possible.
So using this example we can look at a healthy human diet like this. We should be consuming primarily fruit, 50% of our diet should come from fruit. Then large amounts of leafy greens, at least 20-25% of our diet should be leafy greens. Vegetables would come next with 15-20%. Fruits, greens and vegetables should include a large variety, varied both seasonally and weekly. The remaining 5-15% should consist of Nuts, Seeds, Cold Pressed Oils, and if desired, organic pasture raised meats or organic fish and organic eggs.
So how do we go from a nation living in a state of chronic dis-ease to a state of vibrant health and abundant energy? How do we change from a nation of Animal Protien and Dairy consumers to fruit and vegetable consumers? We start slow, we make small changes until they become a habit and then we make a few more.
Want to learn more about how to eat healthy? Read on:
How do I transition to a Healthy diet? Getting Started in a Healthy Diet. Healing your body from the inside out.