Healthy Diet

Healthy Eating

This is a huge topic. I have written a book available on Amazon digitally “Mindful Eating: You Are What You Eat”. You may purchase a Kindle E-Book version at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J17N3GO . Distilling it down to sage advice rather than 80 pages:

Eat a whole-foods diet high in nutrient-dense foods trying to reach a balance on calories absorbed of 40-50% fat; 20-40% protein; 10-20% carbohydrate. The carbs, on the whole, should be low glycemic except at each meal you do want some simple sugars to turn off fasting mode and increase the metabolic rate. The fats should be saturated and monounsaturated fats predominantly. The polyunsaturated fats should be fresh non-oxidized and close to a 1:1 ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 and never above 4:1 ratio.

The above is a mouthful. Industrial foods have all sorts of chemicals added as well as extra sugars, colors, artificial flavors, salt, preservatives, and fillers. They have near zero Omega 3 fatty acids as they turn rancid over time. Most have GMO crops in them unless advertised otherwise. Therefore the whole-foods recommendation.

Absorbed calories are also an interesting topic. Finely cut and heated food is more completely absorbed in the small bowel than chewed raw foods. In fact, only 10% of raw vegetables are absorbed in the small bowel. That leaves food for the large bowel bacteria to work on, which is healthy. Cooking the vegetables increase the absorption of calories by 12 fold.

The amount of fat in the diet is much higher than has been recommended in the past, but we now know that low-fat diets caused our obesity epidemic. Ingested fat will prevent the sensation of hunger longer than protein or carbs. The fat aids in the absorption of fat-soluble nutrients and vitamins. It is a huge paradigm shift to eat eggs, butter, cheese, coconut oil, olive oil, and animal fat. If the percentage of fat is to be increased, the percentage of carbohydrates needs to be reduced.

Advanced Glycated End-products (AGEs) are proteins in which glucose binds irreversibly to multiple nitrogens on the amino acid backbone that make up the protein. The deformed protein loses its function and the only way the body has is to use chemical mediators of inflammation to destroy them or just allow them to accumulate in the cells. As these additions only occur when the blood concentration of glucose is elevated, the obvious way to limit AGE production is to limit carbohydrates in the diet. A simple test of HgbA1c can give you a rough idea of how well you are doing. AGEs are the cause of atherosclerosis, degenerative osteoarthritis, Alzheimer's Dementia, cataracts, and many other modern chronic diseases.

We also need magnesium, sulfur, iron, iodine in our diet and skin sun absorption for many critical processes in our body. In fact, I strongly believe the product of Cholesterol-Sulfate catalyzed in the skin with exposure to sunlight will become acknowledged as a major preventer of atherosclerosis, degenerative osteoarthritis, diabetes, and cancer over the next 15 years.

Almost all the common chronic illnesses and degenerative diseases have at their core our immune system causing damage. Good scientific research is directing a focus on small bowel endothelial lining dysfunction called increased intestinal permeability or leaky gut. Basically food products cross the endothelial lining in large fragments not fully digested and trigger our immune system to destroy those food fragments. In so doing some of the antibodies cross-react with “US” cellular antigens setting off a cascade of chemically mediated damage. If you are interested in a more detailed discussion and recommendations, please contact me.

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