I have been studying diet and nutrition for 45 years, and particularly the impact of diet on the immune system for the last 10 years. As my research has progressed over the last several years, it is beginning to feel like I am in an echo chamber. The same basic principals and recommended foods keep appearing in the various specific diet approaches for various diseases. Most recently I read the book “The End of Alzheimer’s” by Dale Bredesen MD. His approach to Alzheimer’s demonstrates the most comprehensive understanding to the cause of not only Alzheimer’s, but chronic bodily disease states in general that I have yet to come across. I have been telling everyone that health is very complex for years. His research has identified 36 different factors that have to be considered and balanced to reverse a chronic disease like Alzheimer’s.
Before that was Dr Walsh’s book on correcting mental disorders through nutrition, and before him was Dr. Gundry’s approach to reversing chronic disease and Dr Wahl’s book on reversing auto-immune disease like MS. Add these to the many books I have read on Ketogenic lifestyle and Paleo eating and the mountain of research papers on glycemic foods, inflammatory foods, fasting, and so on. All these books agree about 90% of the time on certain core foods that are to be in a healthy diet and what foods have to be eliminated to relieve the toxic stress that is causing the chronic diseases plaguing the modern world.
To save you the effort I have gone to, I thought I would summarize the current state of the art in food and health as a simple list of the core foods we are to eat if we want to be healthy or need to reverse a poor health issue. First let me say that healthy eating can be approached from almost any set of dietary restrictions. The body is amazing at how well it can adapt to many food sources. That being said, certain essential nutrients have to be derived from the world, so some dietary lifestyles have to supplement their diets with things simply missing from that approach. A prime example would be a vegan lifestyle. There are simply no vegan food sources of B12, and without it you will die.
In this culture we have an obsession with protein. Everybody promotes how much protein their food product has in it, like that is a good thing. The reality is we don’t need all that much protein each day – about 40 to 60 grams a day is all. Most Americans eat much more than that, not understanding that the body cannot store protein, so any excess you eat is simply turned into sugar and then into fat for storage. If you are a vegetarian you need to pay attention to protein levels simply because most vegetarians don’t actually eat a lot of vegetables. If they ate only vegetables then they would get enough protein, as vegetables average 10 to 20% protein on a calorie basis. The protein issue is because of how much of our diet is fat and sugar calories, which has zero protein in it.
Every health author strongly emphasizes one point consistently – eat only real food, not processed food. Dale Bredesen puts it simply – if it has a label on it that lists ingredients, it is a processed food – don’t eat it. This is the biggest challenge for everyone I talk to because it means we all have to either learn to cook or have our own personal chef. But that is the reality. We have to eat fresh foods, not stuff that can sit on a shelf safely. If it
can sit on a shelf, the nutrition has been destroyed and it has been loaded with toxic chemicals to keep bacteria and molds from eating it while it sits on that shelf. Even fresh foods steadily loose nutrition from the moment they are harvested. Time and oxygen destroy nutrients.
This nutrient concern speaks to one of the three basic causes of chronic disease – inflammation, deficiency, and toxicity. Nutrition and diet usually relate to the deficiency leg of the trio of causes for chronic disease. If you don’t have the minerals, vitamins, proteins, energy, and thousands of co-factors the body needs to function, things break down. Nutrition might also relate to the inflammation leg when we look at things like sugar consumption or to the toxicity leg when we look at pesticides or lectins in our foods. So our diet plays into all three causes of chronic disease. We want to clean up our act on all fronts in order to beat the degenerative consequences of the standard American diet and lifestyle.
So what foods are our core power foods? What foods should we be eating all the time and what foods are ok in small amounts a few time per week? The biggest difference I find between authors is on the subject of fruit. Everyone now recognizes that one of the biggest body poisons is fructose – fruit sugar. It causes inflammation and specifically induces weight gain and eventual blood sugar imbalance. But on the other hand, fruit contains lots of super healthy nutrients. This is going to be one of those individual testing situations. You’ll have to discover for yourself just how much fruit supports you, as everyone will be a bit different.
Most everyone now agrees that seeds (grains in particular), legumes, and nightshade veggies are bad for health. They are heavily loaded with toxic substances that damage gut and general health. Except for glutinous grains like wheat, most of these problems can be overcome with sufficient cooking, but are best avoided until our gut is healthy. Vegetables and fruits filled with seeds share these problems.
The top of everybody’s list for healthy foods is:
Leaves, stalks, and stems: lots (5+ cups) every day,
Leafy greens like spinach & chard, lettuces, herbs, cabbage family, stevia, tea, etc…
Stalks and stems like celery, asparagus, leeks, chives, etc…
Roots, tubers, and bulbs: moderate amounts
Root veggies like beets, carrots, radishes, turnips, rutabaga, celery root, konjac, chicory, sun choke, etc…
Tubers like sweet potatoes, yams, jicama, taro, arrowroot, cassava…
Bulbs like onions, garlic, fennel, kohlrabi, etc…
Fruit, fruiting bodies, and flowers: limited amounts
Fruits like avocado, olives, low glycemic tree ripened fruits in season like berries, citrus, plums, green bananas, green papaya, green mango, lo han
Fruiting bodies like Mushrooms and fungi, plus Quorn
Flowers like artichokes, broccoli, and cauliflower
Nuts, seeds, and pods: limited amounts
Nuts like macadamia, almond, walnuts, pecans, coconut, pistachios, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and Brazil nuts, but not cashews or peanuts.
Seeds like flaxseeds, hemp seeds, psyllium, chocolate, sorghum, and millet, plus tempeh, miso and coffee (no legumes)
Pods like green beans and sugar pea pods (depends on author)
Fish, fowl, and critters: limited amounts (4oz per day max)
SMASH fish – Salmon, Mackerel, Anchovies, Sardines, Herring
Eggs, chicken, turkey, emu, game hens, ostrich, duck
Shellfish – shrimp, lobster, crab, scallops, squid,muscles,
Grass fed beef, pork, lamb, bison, wild game
Insects
Fats and oils: as much as desired
Olive oil, avocado oil, ghee, coconut oil / milk, Perilla oil, MCTs, walnut oil, macadamia nut oil, cod liver oil, French/Italian butter – some authors include sheep and goat milk cheeses.
These are your core power foods. Thus, 90 to 95% of your diet should be made from these foods. They are designed to be freshly prepared from the freshest ingredients possible. As you can see any healthy dietary style can be accommodated within these foods. What does not work is the fast food / junk food / snack food / sugar food lifestyle.
Just how tightly you have to adhere to this food list depends on your levels of toxic metals and poisons, your genetics, and how nutritionally depleted you are. If you are good on all these issues, then occasionally indulging in crap food probably won’t hurt you much. You have good genes for eliminating toxins and managing inflammation. But then these people generally don’t have symptoms in the first place and don’t read health articles anyway. The rest of us have to pay attention to our diet. What we put into our bodies directly creates our day-to-day health feelings.
So this is the current summarized state of the art for nutritious eating. Hopefully this gives you some simple guidelines for what to buy the next time you go to the grocery store.