What Foods Should I Be Eating?
I have shared with many of you a podcast I listen to called The Huberman Lab with Andrew Huberman. Andrew is a neuro-scientist from Berkely who hosts experts in science, healing, and wellness from all over the world. The show is dedicated to teaching people how to take charge of their own preventive medicine to be the most healthful people we can be. To this end, he hosted Dr Mark Hyman, an MD and functional medicine proponent who has been doing advocacy around preventive health using diet and lifestyle factors for the last twenty years. Here is a link to the episode:
https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/how-to-improve-your-vitality-heal-from-disease-dr-mark-hyman
Many principals from functional medicine come directly from Chinese Medicine. Preventive medicine is the focus which means, how can we treat our body well in the ways that are within our own power, and rely on pharmaceutical drugs less? We want to live in optimal health in order to prevent or avoid illness in the future. For example, 11% of the US population has Type 2 diabetes- a disease which can almost entirely be prevented by diet and lifestyle changes. Alzheimers, which affects 7 million Americans every year and is now called Type 3 Diabetes, is also largely caused by diet. So why is our American diet so poor and making us so sick? There are some surprising answers to that question.
In Chinese medicine, we say that Food is Medicine. If you eat good food, you will remain healthy and live a full life. However, so much of the cheap and easy to access foods in the US are devoid of any nutritional value. There are 5 major food companies in the US including well-known Pepsi, Kraft, and Nestle. These businesses exist by selling as much of their ultra-processed and highly refined sugar products to US consumers (especially children) as possible. You can see their products everywhere. Go to any birthday party, school cafeteria, or business conference, and you will see them in abundance! But they are also behind the scenes, creating policies which influence your food choices. Did you know that the Coca Cola company gave over $10 million to the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Cardiology, and the American Academy of Pediatrics in the last 5 years? Those organizations of DOCTORS are going to be reluctant to tell their patients not to drink their sponsor’s products. Those organizations also spend much of their time lobbying Congress for bills that will help their sponsor’s like Coca Cola and the Drug Industry and against those that will harm them. As a result, any effort to substitute those products for more healthful food like fruits and vegetables, humanely raised animal products and anything coming from the earth or having eaten anything from the earth is often thwarted.
To give you an example, when health agencies with an interest in helping to reduce illness in the US appeal to Congress to create policies like warning labels on foods with high fructose corn syrup (like labels that exists in most of Europe, but not here) the Big Food groups use their lobbyists and their professional organizations (like the American Academy of Pediatrics) to oppose those bills. As a result, the US allow 95% more toxic chemical ingredients in our food than Europe does. That results in a very unhealthy American population.
So what should you eat? Foods that come from the earth and those that have been eating things that come from the earth. Fruits and vegetables should make up at least half of our diets, whether or not we eat animal products. Next, add in 25-45% good quality meats and animal products like fish (smaller, lower mercury content is best like sardines and anchovies), turkey, chicken, lamb, beef, bison, pork (little less since it’s pretty fatty), chicken eggs, duck eggs, etc. The remaining 5-25% can be good quality and varied grains like oats, amaranth, millet, quinoa, red/black/brown rice (rinsed very well to avoid arsenic).
Notice I did not include dairy, sugar and wheat. It’s best to think of these foods as being outside our list of primary food groups. Like I tell my kids, those are “sometimes” foods and it helps us to think of them like that. They are for celebrations, special occasions, but rarely and as we get older, even more rarely. Our bodies are not designed to digest them and they are the foods that lead to diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s (now called Diabetes Type 3), infertility, and all the metabolic disorders plaguing our nation. Nor did I include ultra-processed foods which I don’t even consider to be foods but rather, edible products, though it’s questionable if they are even really edible.
Supplements will be in my next month’s Newsletter so stay tuned! If we had access to the very best quality fruits, veggies, and meats, we wouldn’t need supplements, but the fact is that our soil doesn’t carry the nutrients it used to and therefore cannot pass them to our food. In addition, we have a lot of STRESS in our culture, more than our bodies were made to handle. Therefore, we need some supplemental nutrients to assist us. More on that next month!