Food: Healthy Eating Principles

[Explor­ing Life] Under­stand­ing what con­sti­tutes healthy eat­ing has become mired in con­fu­sion and con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion. What should we eat? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. (Pol­lan, 2008). Pollen states that our basic assump­tions about what food is have been cor­rupted and manip­u­lated by nutri­tional sci­ence, gov­ern­ment agen­cies, and food cor­po­ra­tions. The result is a bewil­der­ing amount of con­fused, mis­lead­ing, and incor­rect infor­ma­tion about the rela­tion­ship between the food we eat and the men­tal and phys­i­cal health and well­ness we expe­ri­ence in life. In this sense, the con­cept of food must be repaired, clar­i­fied, and renewed. Chang­ing our con­cept of food requires per­sonal change as well as the sys­temic improve­ment of our sys­tems of food pro­duc­tion and envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion.

Four Basic Prin­ci­ples of Healthy Eating

If an indi­vid­ual eats food that den­i­grates the nor­mal func­tions of the body, then that per­son pro­motes their own sick­ness and expo­sure to dis­ease. If com­pa­nies pro­duce and dis­trib­ute food that impair the nat­ural func­tions of the body, then they too inten­tion­ally pro­mote sick­ness and dis­ease in the world. Food orig­i­nates in the envi­ron­ment. If the envi­ron­ment, through human activ­ity, becomes toxic then it is only obvi­ous that our food sup­ply will com­mu­ni­cate those tox­ins through­out our body. If a polit­i­cal agenda, sci­en­tific “dis­cov­ery” or cor­po­rate prof­itabil­ity take prece­dence over the care of our health via food, then we suf­fer a clear lack of eth­i­cal behav­ior that has poten­tially fatal implications.

Four Basic Prin­ci­ples For Healthy Eating

The four basic prin­ci­ples for choos­ing healthy food out­lined by Dr. Mark Hyman [1] are:

1. Eat whole, real, fresh, organic, unprocessed food;
2. Eat fruit and veg­eta­bles rich in phytonutrients;
3. Eat foods rich in fiber;
4. Eat foods con­tain­ing omega-3 fats.

These four basic prin­ci­ples of healthy eat­ing, accord­ing to Hyman, con­sti­tute 90% of what is required to main­tain health and to heal the body of ill­ness (Hyman 2009).

Four Basic Cri­te­ria for Choos­ing Food

To inte­grate these prin­ci­ples into our daily life we need to know how to choose food that is in fact healthy for us. Hyman rec­om­mends select­ing healthy food accord­ing to four basic criteria:

1. Real — Choose food that is as close to its nat­ural state as possible;
2. Clean — Choose grass-fed, antibiotic-hormone-pesticide free ani­mal products;
3. Organic — Choose food that is free to tox­ins. I would add to this food that is only non-GMO;
4. Local — Choose foods that are locally pro­duced, since they are the high­est in nutri­tional value.

Our food sup­ply is infested with addi­tives and chem­i­cals. Though the prob­lem is per­va­sive and seem­ingly unavoid­able, the only rea­son­able course of action is to pur­sue the ideal of com­pletely elim­i­nat­ing all addi­tives and chem­i­cals in our diet. [2]

Buy­ing Real Food

In apply­ing these four prin­ci­ples I have found that shop­ping for gro­ceries, once a rather rou­tine and unthought­ful process, has trans­formed into a process of con­stant inquiry and inves­ti­ga­tion. I soon learned was that approx­i­mately 90% of the gro­cery store became irrelevant.

If it has a label, don’t eat (or buy) it: This effec­tively elim­i­nates any prod­uct in a can, box, or pack­age. The word “food” is not related to these prod­ucts, and as Michael Pollen sug­gests, we should think of these prod­ucts as “food-like sub­stances.” Any prod­uct required to list any addi­tive designed to alter the appear­ance, the taste, the smell, sub­sti­tute some­thing, or to pre­serve it is not food. If a crit­i­cal mass of con­sumers were to embrace this ideal, food pro­duc­ers would would be forced to improve or go out of business.

Pur­sue the ideal of no toxic load: Unless a food source is cer­ti­fied organic it prob­a­bly con­tains some kind of toxic load. A toxic load includes the pres­ence of pes­ti­cides, hor­mones, antibi­otics, mer­cury (in large preda­tory fish), caf­feine or alco­hol in an ani­mal or veg­etable food source. These tox­ins are a pri­mary cause of dis­ease, both men­tal and physical.

The restau­rant dilemma: In a restau­rant, we really don’t know what we are eat­ing. Unless the restau­rant indi­cates that it uses only fresh, local, organic, chem­i­cal and addi­tive free food sources, we are likely eat­ing food-like sub­stances that con­tain a toxic load. Though the sub­stances may taste “good” they are, in all prob­a­bil­ity, unhealthy and toxic. There is lit­tle ques­tion that the suc­cess of a restau­rant in the future will incor­po­rate healthy eat­ing as a basic assump­tion prepar­ing the food they serve to the pub­lic. This will require dra­matic improve­ments in the qual­ity of food sup­pli­ers and pro­duc­ers. At this point, there is lit­tle evi­dence that restau­rants have evolved in this direc­tion and, in this sense, remain prim­i­tive. Busi­nesses that serve food to the pub­lic must become part of the solu­tion, not a per­pet­u­a­tion of the problem.

Slow food: One of the most dam­ag­ing com­po­nents of our food sys­tem is the fast food indus­try. The very notion that food should be “fast” orig­i­nates in the depths of igno­rance and the obses­sion with mate­r­ial profit. Fast food is not, in fact, “food” in any mean­ing­ful sense of the word. The accep­tance of the fast food indus­try reveals a loss of pri­or­i­ties, both social and health, in life. Fast food is noth­ing more than a form of cul­tural vir­u­lence. Slow food is a return to social and phys­i­cal health.

Food and body aware­ness: Our nor­mal and nat­ural state is to eat a wide vari­ety of food, espe­cially plants. Tra­di­tional dietary advice groups foods into var­i­ous cat­e­gories and rec­om­mends a “daily intake” accord­ing to the lat­est notions found in nutri­tional sci­ence. How­ever, we sim­ply do not under­stand the vast range of inter­ac­tion that takes place when we eat. Rather than focus­ing on “get­ting enough” of each cat­e­gory, we should sim­ply focus on vari­ety of food that includes legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains, veg­eta­bles and fruit. More impor­tantly, we need to learn to “lis­ten” to the mes­sages within our own body, which are a far more pow­er­ful indi­ca­tor of what we need (and what we don’t need).

Sum­mary

The prin­ci­ples of eat­ing are both sim­ple and in some respects obvi­ous. Much of what is hap­pen­ing in the domain of nutri­tional sci­ence is sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, or a return to basic prin­ci­ples. Fur­ther, nutri­tional sci­ence seems to be in an “elim­i­na­tion” mode, that is to say, pro­vid­ing rec­om­men­da­tions to remove a wide vari­ety of food and food-like sub­stances from our diets. To accom­plish this, we must first rede­fine what we mean by the word “food.” Once this hap­pens, we are then able to per­ceive the world of food through a new and health­ier perspective.

Notes

1. For more infor­ma­tion on Dr. Mark Hyman and The Ultra­Mind Solu­tion visit his web­site.

2. The Cen­tre for Sci­ence in the Pub­lic Inter­est con­tains a wealth of infor­ma­tion and reg­u­lar updates regard­ing food addi­tives and chemicals.