Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?, by best-selling author Mark Hyman, MD, opens with an important point that underscores most of our discussion of food: everyone’s confused or misinformed about what to eat on an ongoing basis. Scientists publish studies. Unsubstantiated “studies” are published by people who make drastic changes and capitalize (literally, for profit) on their exceptional results. And, the media report on most of them. And, advertisements promote them all, further mixing it altogether.
Humans have been developing nutritional habits from our ancient historical upbringing, and we can sustain ourselves on a wide variety of foods. In this week’s edition of the blog, I take a look at getting back to the nutrition basics so we can all understand food better and make good nutrition lifestyle choices.
Less Processed Foods | Getting Back to Nutrition Basics
In one of the largest studies of long-term food-related health ever done, T. Colin Campbell, MD, found a shocking connection between food and disease. (If you’d like to dive further, he detailed this in The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted And the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, And Long-term Health, in 2006, and latest in his 2016 updated and revised edition.) This demonstrated a strong link between the overconsumption of meat and higher rates of cancer, among other diseases. The most important thing for everyday Americans is Dr. Campbell’s focus on promoting a whole food, plant-based (WFPB) nutrition lifestyle, which he wrote extensively about in Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition.
In brief, a WFPB nutrition lifestyle, as Dr. Campbell calls it, helps us all in getting back to nutrition basics. He recommends that we should be consuming foods that are closer to their origins (fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains) and so the less processed foods the better.
What is a processed food? And, why should you eat less processed foods, you ask? Processed food is simply any food that’s not how nature provided it; it’s been engineered and packaged mostly to taste different or stay edible longer. This provides benefits to the global food chain, manufacturers and retailers with less food spoilage in transit to stores and longer shelf lives while in inventory. It’s not all bad. However, in nature, whole foods don’t have these unnaturally added phosphate, sodium, sugars, unhealthy additives, and other unnecessary preservatives. And, that’s where a WFPB option can help you avoid a processed food.
CNN, in “‘Detox’ from overly processed foods: Why and how to cut back,” provides a great rundown on how to cut back on processed foods. A good rule of thumb is, if you have a choice between something fresh and natural, choose that over one that has been changed and packaged.
Avoid Fad Diets | Getting Back to Nutrition Basics
As you can see so far, I’ve deliberately not used the “D” word when talking about getting back to nutrition basics. It’s become an easy catchall phrase for any food methodology for weight-loss, sustained wellness, and renewed vitality. I am using nutrition lifestyle in this post to distinguish better eating healthy from the idea of following a one-size-fits-all plan that will work for everybody.
As part of any nutrition lifestyle, knowing more about what components make up food is important and how we measure them. This leads me to macronutrients, micronutrients, and calories.
Macronutrients are the “large” nutrients—proteins, carbohydrates, and fats—the body needs to gain calories to function generally. On the other hand, micronutrients are commonly referred to as “vitamins and minerals,” and they are made up of the 28 essential nutrients the body needs to live; there are other micronutrients but they aren’t essential.
Calories are simply the amount of energy needed to sustain your life from day to day. It’s technical term in food parlance is actually the “kilocalorie,” or “food calorie,” which is how much energy it takes to increase the temperature of one gram of water one degree (Celsius). Often misunderstood, we don’t consume calories per se, but that we consume macronutrients that are the sources of our calories. Any macronutrient if not used by the body immediately for energy (or discarded as waste) is stored as fat in different deposit areas of the body.
With some fundamentals out of the way, we can better understand the basics of maintaining a healthy weight: use more calories (stored as fat) than you consume. If you eat less calories than normal and burn more calories from your fat stored, you lose weight.
Fad diets tend to make us believe that there’s a magical formula of specific macro- and micronutrient-carrying foods. No such thing. Food is food. Balance out your macronutrients according to one of the many, many, many, many pyramid and plate diagrams and you’re likely also going to get all the micronutrients you need as well.
We’ve already discussed that fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains, minimizing (not eliminating) processed foods, is the best nutrition lifestyle. So, you don’t need to diet and exercise. You need to create a healthy nutrition lifestyle and get in enough physical activity daily (walking around the neighborhood and walking up and down your stairs count!) to burn calories. No fad required.
Eat Seasonally Local | Getting Back to Nutrition Basics
Last but certainly not least is a concept Americans know but don’t embrace as much as they should, which is eating seasonally local. Getting back to nutrition basics also means getting back to the foundations of how food grows based on the seasons in your region.
Here in the Washington DC / northern Virginia region, we have the luxury of being southern enough that we get more warm weather for more fruits and vegetables than our more northern neighbors. And, we have farmlands galore, as we discussed before. Eating foods grown locally in season means that they are less likely to need to be genetically modified for long-distance travel, it typically costs less because supply is abundant driving down prices, and you get to support your local farming communities. An added perk is that you get greater variety of fruits and vegetables in your nutrition lifestyle while feeling good about less impact on the environment.
The greatest issue with eating locally in season is finding out what’s actually in season, and for that, the Web has provided. Seasonal Food Guide is beautiful and functional, providing fruits and vegetables by locating you and displaying options for the time of year automatically. Also, the DC Seasonality Chart does a great job on a one-page PDF showing what plus when it is available. If you need to broaden your culinary tastes beyond just your immediate geographic region, you can also find the fruits and vegetables in season by winter, spring, summer, fall, and even year-round.
—
As Jason Phillips notes in his talk at Google, “All in Nutrition,” there are some “non-negotiables” you need to figure out in your lifestyle. Do you like specialty foods (ice cream and chocolate, anyone?)? The real solution is a nutrition lifestyle that includes those specialty foods. Don’t be fooled by the Paleo, Ketogenic, South Beach or Atkins diet fads.
You know the real recipe for health and fitness is getting back to basics. Track the caloric values of the macronutrients you’re consuming, and at the same time, keep a chart of how many calories you burn every day from physical activity. There’s a great app called MyFitnessPal (owned by UnderArmour) that helps tracking this information for you. We know that if we keep tally of what we eat and burn calorie-wise, even if we don’t share it with anyone else, we are helping to keep ourselves honest and accountable to improving. This helps us start to maintain a healthy nutrition lifestyle.
Have you made adjustments to your nutrition lifestyle in getting back to nutrition basics? Let us know in the comments!