One of the best questions I’ve been asked…
I consider a diet or nutrition plan to be a good one if it has stood the test of time, and by that I mean if multiple generations - so at least 5 - have thrived on it. Any diet or nutrition plan without this evidence behind it should be viewed / used with a certain amount of caution…
Diets from around the world that meet this standard all - that’s ALL of them! - share four common components:
- They include fresh food
- They include fermented and sprouted foods
- They all include meat cooked on the bone
- They all include organ meats
And if we go back a few generations, it’s likely that they’d also share:
- Significantly lower sugar intake than modern times
- Significantly less vegetable oil consumption than modern times - Significantly more exposure to natural light than modern times
But I think we may have heard enough of that particular broken record...
“What’s So Good About Those 4 Components?”
In brief…
Fresh food is important because they contain antioxidants - basically, electron trapping chemicals that help prevent the two most common causes of tissue inflammation and degenerative diseases.
Fermented foods are important because they “top up your good bacteria”… Without them we would be unable to break down toxins that could potentially kill us, unable to convert simple sugars into complex nutrients, and unable to create vitamins that our diets may lack [k2, b12, etc] - this is a huge topic. I’m just going to leave it at that.
Meat cooked on the bone is important because it contains all the good stuff your joints need - glucosaminoglycans, a family of molecules that includes glucosamine, chondroitin sulfate, and hyaluronic acid. The collagen will give your skin some elasticity while healing your gut, and in addition, mineral salts are released from bone and cartilage when cooked, releasing calcium, potassium, iron, sulfate, sodium, phosphate, chloride, etc etc…
Organ meats are important because they are rich in vitamins - especially fat soluble vitamins… The picture below compares 100g of apple, to 100g of liver, to 100g of broccoli... See for yourself.
* Retinol equivalents... Only animal products contain true vitamin A; fruits and vegetables contain carotenoids and retinoids which have to be converted in the digestive tract. The conversion factor used has overestimated the value by a factor of 4, and that's assuming that the person doing the converting actually converts it well, which they probably don't... [too young, too old, consume grains, sick, cold climate, etc] The inclusion of those four components make for a good diet, in my evidence based opinion... A 6 week transformation / before and after photo shows me little... Keep your eye on the big picture, not just on the scales...
“Sit the f*** down and have a beer”
~ Coach Collins
Copyright 2018