The true Healthy Eating Pyramid

Continuing to Delve - The Meats

2008-10-15T19:08:00.000-07:00

Meat is a vital component of the human diet. Vegetarians, despite their claims, simply cannot get 100% of the vital amino acids from vegetables without also consuming dangerous levels of plant-based estrogens and enzyme inhibitors that keep them from properly digesting their food. In addition, vegetarians almost universally suffer from minor copper toxicity and a corresponding zinc deficiency (the two are antagonistic: too much of one causes a drop in the other).

Meat, in the primitive diet, was a much more profitable consumption than it is today. Back when we had to hunt our own animals, we got meat that was created by a healthy, active creature living off the land. Today, most of the meat we eat is "dumbed down" - it's meat from docile, passive creatures that eat a melange of garbage left over from human and other animal feeds. That said, meat still acts as a concentrated source of many nutrients and vitamins. In much the same way that a huge funnel allows you to collect raindrops from several square feet into a concentrated flow of water, meat allows you to collect nutrients from hundreds of plants (or other animals!) in a single, easy-to-consume source.

Meat is also the only complete source of amino acids, a vital substance for bodily function. Something very close to a complete protein set can be faked up by eating legumes and rice together, but there are simply some amino acids that don't exist in plant matter, and that your body can't create on it's own.

It's almost impossible to eat too much meat -- not because there isn't a point at which it becomes "bad for you", but because your body literally stops you before you reach that point (unless you have a carbohydrate addiction and the meat is packaged with a easy-to-digest carbohydrate, like McNuggets or pigs-in-a-blanket.)

The most important thing to remember when eating meat is to not overcook it. Not only does overcooking break down some proteins and ruin the complete protein profile, it also destroys many nutrients that the meat would otherwise provide. While brief cooking is good to make meat palatable and reduce the risk of bacterial problems, overcooking is just as bad if not worse, in the long run, then eating the meat raw.

Delving a little deeper - The Veggies

2008-07-29T16:51:00.000-07:00

I'd like to look a little deeper at the base of the Corrected Healthy Eating Pyramid: vegetables. Vegetables are important sources of vitamins, minerals, and water in your diet -- as well as fiber, if you're eating enough flour and sugar that you need fiber to maintain what the commercials call "regularity". But just eating vegetables according to a numerical count of 'servings' isn't enough.

Vegetables come in a wide variety. There are green, red, yellow, white, purple, and brown vegetables; there are hard, soft, wet, dry, crunchy, mushy, sweet, and sour vegetables. I feel like Dr. Seuss. Regardless, the Healthy Eating Pyramid is not just about eating them -- it's about eating the variety of them.

Every veggie has different minerals, vitamins, cofactors, and essential acids. The vegetable's color tells you a lot about it. For example, orange vegetables like carrots and some peppers are high in betacarotene, whch your body transforms into Vitamin A. Eating a wide variety of colors of vegetable helps your body get all of the nutrients it needs.

Vegetables also have a lot of water -- and most Americans don't get enough, even if they try hard to drink. It's because a lot of the fluids we consume -- like soda -- have such a high concentration of other stuff (high fructose corn syrup) that their water content isn't nearly what you'd think it would be by looking at it. It's important to get plenty of water from your food as well as your drinks, and vegetables are a great way to do that.

It's also almost impossible to eat too many veggies -- as long as you're washing them (or buying organic), they don't contain more than trace amounts of chemicals or additives that would adversly affect your health, and they do great things for your body.

It is very important to note, however, that not all plants fall into the "fruit" or "veggie" categories. Potatoes, corn, peas, and all grains fall into the "starch" category, which it IS important to watch your consumption of. Too many carbohydrates leads to all kinds of problems, from addiction and fatigue to cancer and diabetes.

So, eat your vegetables - eat lots of them, and eat a wide variety. The Healthy Eating Pyramid's base is really hard to get too much of, so enjoy!

The Corrected Healthy Eating Pyramid

2008-07-09T14:26:00.001-07:00

OK, on to the corrected food pyramid.

First off, we know now that, if you’re eating right, the amount of calories you consume doesn’t matter. This is a very controversial and revolutionary idea that has only recently gained acceptance through newly-published works such as “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. This Ebook describes the phenomenon as well as laying out in significantly more detail the dietary measures that will keep you healthy no matter how many calories you consume.

Now that we know that it’s the proportion of food we’re shooting for and not some arbitrary number of calories to eat that’s important, the pyramid itself: The “bottom”, foundation-layer of a healthy diet is vegetables. Vegetables are high in water, vitamins, and nutrients. In order to benefit from eating vegetables, it’s important to eat several different kinds of vegetables across the day.

Be aware, however, that many things we consider vegetables are not in this category. Corn, for example, is a starch, as are peas and potatoes of all varieties. The simple measure is this: if you can make a chip out of it (corn chips, potato chips, taro chips, etc.), it’s a starch. Avocadoes are a fat, but fortunately are the only vegetable I know of that fits in this category. No rule to memorize there.

The next layer is meat. Not beans, not nuts -- real, animal meat. Vegetarians may not like this, but it's nearly impossible to get a complete set of essential amino acids and essential fatty acids from plant matter. Humans can survive entirely on a diet of meat -- Eskimos and Bantu tribesman have been doing it for thousands of years without a trace of heart disease, cancer, or other common American maladies -- but it's a lot easier to get proper nutrition when you eat lots of veggies, too.

(If you insist on a vegan diet, you can get something close to a complete essentials-profile by eating from both the “nuts” family (not including peanuts) and the “legume” family (which oddly does include peanuts as well as beans and other legumes) at the same time. If you don’t mix them in your stomach, there’s a significantly lower chance of the proteins recombining to form the essential acids that you need. Also, you’ll need to eat a significant portion of either chia seed or kiwifruit. There are a few essential fatty acids that don’t exist at all in plants – but fortunately, your body can recombine one other fatty acid to generate the one that you wouldn’t otherwise get. That one fatty acid is found in small amounts in soy and flax (both of which you should avoid for other reasons), and in large amounts in kiwifruit and chia seed. Keep in mind that there are several other good reasons to avoid a vegan diet, including zinc loss and copper toxicity that I don’t have time or space to go into here.)

Next up is fruit. Fruits should be your primary source of carbohydrates, and even then, too many carbs can have long-term health problems including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and more. Fruits, like veggies, are high in water, vitamins, and minerals, and thus getting a wide variety of them is important. Don’t stock up too much on just one kind of fruit!

On the same level, we have dairy. Cheese, milk, yogurt, whatever -- just don't drink milk that isn't whole. Here's why: the FDA doesn't have rules about what goes into non-whole milk. Companies can seriously add any substance that makes their product look, smell, taste, or feel more like milk, and they don't have to tell you about it. If you don't control what you consume, you can't ever expect to control your long-term health. If at all possible, drink old-school, RAW milk. Milk has enzymes in it that help your body digest it – even if you’re lactose intolerant – and pasteurization and homogenization break those enzymes, as well as the naturally-occurring vitamin D in milk, down. They add Vitamin D back in, but the stuff they add is synthesized, and has none of the cofactors that actually help you uptake the vitamin, so it’s largely excreted.

Take that as an object lesson: the closer to a food’s natural context you eat it in, the more your body will get out of it.

Fat is the next category. Most of your fat will come in your meat and dairy, but this special extra section is for those fats that you need above and beyond your incidental fat intake in order to make sure that you're getting a complete Essential Fatty Acid profile. Make sure that you get some Omega-3 fatty acids and some Omega-6 fatty acids. These come from oils such as olive oil, butter, expeller-pressed nut oils (almond, peanut, etc.), fish oils, and expeller-pressed seed oils (NOT Canola oil, but other seed oils like linseed and flaxseed).

As an aside, avoid low-fat, reduced-fat, and fat-free foods. All of these products lose their context and have it replaced by artificial additions in order to keep roughly the same flavor.

Finally, as the smallest line, we have starches. Not bread, pancakes, Swiss Rolls, or biscuits and gravy -- flour kills just as much as sugar does. They’re both overprocessed, context-less foods that literally leech vitamins and minerals out of your body and cause you to excrete them.
Starches means whole foods, like potatoes, corn on the cob, wild rice, quinoa, bulgar wheat, and the like. If you love bread, get the sprouted-grain, flourless bread. White rice also leeches vitamins from your muscles, so avoid it.

Zero servings of starch is normal for me -- it's not necessary at all. If you paid attention above, you’d notice that there are Essential Fatty Acids (fat) and Essential Amino Acids (protein), but no such thing as an Essential Carbohydrate. That’s because your body is perfectly capable of creating every carbohydrate that it needs without you needing to consume any. But if you want it, you can totally have a serving each day without damaging your long-term health, as long as it’s not flour-based.

Speaking of sugar, notice that it doesn't appear on the corrected Healthy Eating Pyramid. Sugar is the “Prime Cause” of our nation's obesity epidemic, as well as the flood of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and more that we've experienced in the last few decades. Sugar is horribly addictive -- some studies have compared it to heroin or cocaine in difficulty to break the addiction to -- and it literally sucks vital nutrients and vitamins out of your body while it packs the fat onto every square inch of your body.

That said, sugar is irreplaceable in some recipes, and I understand that. If you are going to use sugar (and I admit that I do occasionally, too!), try to get ahold of sugar in it’s most unprocessed, natural form possible. In my experience, the best place is at an Oriental food store – in the form of “palm sugar” or “coconut sugar”. This is literally stuff that they let leak from a stabbed tree, boiled down until it was solid, and shipped to your community ethnic store to sell. It’s the best context you’ll ever find in sugar. Even then, use it in moderation – just enough to give the flavor you need to make a dish right.

If you need help, or want more information, How to Eat Food will answer any question you may have.

Follow these rules, get the corrected Healthy Eating Pyramid up in your house, and – while it might take a month for you to get there – I guarantee you will feel the difference every morning.

Disassembling the Healthy Eating Pyramid

2008-07-06T21:02:00.000-07:00

Everyone in America has seen the USDA's Healthy Eating Pyramid. It's supposed to be our guide to eating food. Just in case anyone has forgotten:

The Food Pyramid is supposedly designed to get us all eating the 'right' diet -- a diet high in carbohydrates (the proportions of the colored lines are supposed to represent the proportion of each item as a percentage of your caloric intake), low in fat -- notice that 'meats' no longer contains fats; they've been bumped into the same category as candy -- and with a good variety of fruits and vegetables.

This may surprise you, but the Healthy Eating Pyramid is seriously flawed. How flawed? Learn more.. It's the result of some oft-debunked ‘research’ done in the World War II era that managed to convince everyone that fat -- specifically, saturated fat -- was the cause of heart disease. The man that promoted this flawed research (name: Ancel Keys) was called out by the USDA in 1953: they told everyone that his research was flawed. Four years later, he joined the USDA, and he went back and changed their conclusions about his work.

How many of us would love the chance to do that? If I could go back and "correct" all of the things anyone has ever said about me, I'd be scheduled for sainthood.

Point being, once he had erased all of the stains on his reputation, he set about making sure that his flawed research was the basis for the USDA's dietary recommendations for our entire country. Ever since he convinced the government to back him up -- ever since we, as a nation, switched to his diet -- our rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and hypertension have skyrocketed. This is because simple body chemistry demonstrates facts that directly contravene the USDA's advice.

More on that later.

For now, let me tell you what the Pyramid should look like:

Before I go into the specifics, let me break down food for you. All food comes with some proportion of the following six elements:

· Water
· Carbohydrates
· Protein (including essential amino acids)
· Fat (including essential fatty acids)
· Vitamins
· Minerals

In addition, unprocessed food like whole fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and meat that hasn’t been irradiated comes with additional elements:

· Enzymes that help you digest the food you’re eating
· Stuff that fights bacteria, viruses, and the like
· Cofactors and other substances that help your body use vitamins and minerals

It’s important to know that the more processed a food is, the less likely it is to contain any of these (and, in fact, many forms of processing, like pasteurization and irradiation, also destroy vitamins.)

The more enzymes and cofactors your body gets with it’s food (I call this the “context” of the food, because it’s always found in food if you eat it as close to it’s natural context as possible), the more your body gets out of the food it eats. You can eat a ton of vitamins and not get any functionality out of them at all if you don’t have the right stuff to go with it. (This can be demonstrated by the fact that millions of Centrum and other mega- vitamins, so intact that you can still read the words etched in the side, have been pulled out of port-a-potties across the country.)

In short: The Healthy Eating Pyramid is a joke; it takes a certified nutritionist's expertise to get you on the right track.