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Health & Fitness

The One Variable With The Strongest Correlation to Health?

This is a quick and dirty overview of how you should be eating for optimal health, but it in no way covers everything you need to know. But it will be a great starting point!

 

Ask 100 people how you should eat to (insert health goal here), and you'll get 100 different answers. There is so much misinformation floating around about diet and nutrition that I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.  

Without getting too political, there are a lot of incentives that drive the production of less than ideal foodstuffs.  Between corn subsidies, food stamps, and GMO's, there is money to be made in the food business, and it isn't by producing and selling whole, nutrition products.  Because of this, there is a boatload of misinformation floating around, waiting to derail your journey to health.  

A few of the more damaging myths are as follows:

  • Whole Wheat Bread is Good for You - This is like saying cigarettes fortified with vitamin A are good for you. Sure, there is a good thing in it, but that doesn't negate the damage it can do. For more, read 11 Ways Wheat Can Damage Your Health.
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  • Saturated Fat leads to Heart Disease - It took me a long time to finally believe all the scientific studies that don't support this. It is so ingrained in us all by now. The fact of the matter is that the science does not support the position that saturated fat leads to heart disease. I call it The Great Heart Disease Hoax.
  •  
  • High Fructose Corn Syrup is Fine - the corn lobby continues to push ads saying this despite the known dangers of HFCS. For instance, HFCS has been linked to Hepatic Steatosis (fatty liver), strongly linked to the obesity epidemic, and a main player in the pathophysiology of leptin resistance, insulin resistance, diabetes, and the metabolic syndrome (basically all the problems that Americans over 50 have).
 

These are just a few of the many examples I could give of outrageously wrong information that is given to the public every day. The question then is what should we eat? The answer really is surprisingly simple.

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Eat a grain-free, whole foods diet.

Why grain free? Because in a recent study, scientists compared modern diets with ancestral diets of indigenous peoples around the world and came up with a single factor that was most strongly correlated with health.

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It wasn't macronutrient makeup, as some peoples ate a 65% fat diet while others ate a 80+% carbohydrate diet and neither society had any of the "western diseases." It wasn't glycemic index, as there were societies who got a large portion of their calories from things like potatoes and parsnips, yet still showed no symptoms of "western diseases."

The one thing that explained the difference in health between indigenous peoples on an ancestral diet and the rest of us, was carbohydrate density. This means that the percentage of carbs per 100g of food was lower. Eating whole foods means that the carbohydrates you do consume are complexed within cellular structures, as opposed to being broken up and smashed together, like breads, pastas, and candy.

Whole foods appear to limit carbohydrate density to about 23%, while the carbs most of us eat, including breads (even the whole wheat kind), can have carbohydrate density as high as 100%.  So what, then, do we eat?

What to Eat

  • Meat and Vegetables
  • Nuts and Seeds
  • Some Fruits
  • Little Starch
  • No Sugar
  • No Grains
 

This is a quick and dirty overview of how you should be eating for optimal health, but it in no way covers everything you need to know. Below are just a few online resources that could be very helpful for anyone who wants to make a change and get healthier.

1. Mark's Daily Apple - This is a fantastic blog that is constantly updated with valuable and useful information as well as delicious recipes!

2. Health-Bent - Recipes, book reviews, how-to guides, special offers, and more!

3. Does Calorie Counting Really Work - Spoiler...No. No it doesn't. At least not in the long term. Anyone can starve themselves to lose a few pounds, but don't we really want to be healthier, not just smaller?

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