The One Rule of Perfect Health
There is so much advice out there about how to be healthy that it's hard to be anything other than overwhelmed, confused, and upset. For starters, no one can really tell you what 'healthy' means. They can tell you what it's not: it's not being obese, it's not having high blood pressure or high cholesterol or not...or not...or not...Health, REAL health, can be defined by the answer to three simple questions:
Do you take medication (of any kind at all)?
Have you gone to see your doctor for anything that wasn't an accident like a broken bone?
Are you, in general, comfortable and happy?
If you answered NO, NO, and YES in that order, congrats! You are officially as healthy as any person can hope to be. So, how do you go about attaining this state of ideal health? The answer is amazingly simple. It starts, to absolutely no one's surprise, with your diet.
Ready? I'm going to give the The Rule:
Eat whole foods that have been grown using nutritive methods - but no soy.
That's really it!
Millions of people claim success with this diet or that diet, and they are all successful. They're just wrong about WHY they're successful. Attaining health has nothing do to with a vegetarian diet - look up Vilhjalmur Stefansson in Wikipedia if you don't believe me - any more than it has to do with eating entirely meat. The key difference is that dieters almost universally eat more whole foods than non-dieters.
All of this confusion is the result of a simple fact about food studies: you cannot change one element of a diet without also changing another. If you reduce carb intake, you also reduce caloric intake UNLESS you also increase either protein or fat intake, which throws off the experiment in a different way.
The only reasonable way to approach diet theory, then, isn't from an experimental perspective, because experiments just don't work for studying the human diet. It's from a bio-historical standpoint. How did humankind eat back when we didn't know enough to screw ourselves up?
The answer is pretty intuitively obvious: we hunted, we gathered, and we ate whatever we hunted and gathered. We didn't have the technological capacity to grow enough grain to feed a community, much less mill it into white flour and pour it into our gullets. That's how the human digestive system developed - and that's how it still works today!
So, stick to whole foods, grown in natural ways. Soy is another story.
That's the rule, plain and simple. Of course, there are a lot of tiny details that, if you are a dedicated seeker of REAL health, you need to learn. But if you're just casually interested in your own future well-being, you can skip this click here altogether.