Are you confused about what to eat? Most Americans are. We have towering stacks of health and diet books and they often seem contradictory. Nutrition news, too, may report conflicting information. Stop reading the news, and you can feel you're being left behind pretty quickly.
What's hot comes and goes: remember the Vitamin C craze? Or, how Vitamin E supplementation was so important? How about betacarotene? Now we're hearing about Vitamin D all the time. How much is necessary? How much is safe?
It's important to remember that as sciences go, nutrition is in its infancy. A lot of research is being done all the time. Much of it is funded by organizations that have a stake in the result. When new drugs are approved, the drug companies publish the studies that show the drug has positive results, contradictory studies (which may equal the positive studies) simply aren't published and the FDA is fine with this. Furthermore, the publishing industry, being for profit, recognizes that diet books, cookbooks, and health books are very popular and their motivation in publishing so many of these titles is to make money: these are not public service items. Anyone can write these books and the research cited in them is usually done on young, healthy people, the type of people who will be healthy on pretty much any diet for a short time at least. And, speaking of diets, if you restrict calories in any way, people will lose weight in the short term, which is what allows all diet books to honestly claim their method works.
The last part of this cautionary tail is this: the USDA, the agency that brings us the USDA Food Pyramid was established during the Great Depression to achieve two goals: to help feed starving children and to find a market for farmers. Our children are no longer starving (at least not calorie-wise) and the way we subsidize farming has lead to corn and soy being ubiquitous. It's driven down prices of certain commodities, making those foods seem inexpensive (when actually we're paying for them through taxes and with our health) and making other, not subsidized, food seem expensive (mostly fruits and vegetables). Lobbying efforts keep the USDA Food Pyramid, a political tool: it is not a good guideline for how to eat healthfully.
Fortunately, there's good news. If you sift through the research, the studies, and the books, there is a common thread on how to eat healthfully. It's blissfully simple: eat close to nature. What's that mean? Eat whole, fresh foods as much as possible.
Yesterday I met with a client who's looking and feeling great. She's in her second month of my six-month program. She saw her doctor a couple of weeks ago - all her tests were the best they've been in years - including that her cholesterol level was down 40 points. I asked her what she attributed it to. She replied she's doubled her intake of vegetables.
It seems amazing that with all the books, magazine articles, and scientific studies it should come down to this, but it does. Just eat real foods.
And now, I'll do the only thing that seems to make sense at the moment. I'll sign off. But, I'd love to know what you think - do you believe it can really be this easy?
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