The Simplest Diet Plan Ever – 3 Easy Steps to Healthy Living
Emily Clark

You’ve heard the popular advice on weight loss diets. Cut the
fat! Cut the carbs! Cut the calories! Eat a balanced diet! But
how can you cut though all of the confusion, and eat a diet
that’s balanced and healthy?

Here’s the advice from nutritional science:

Cut the JUNK fats: Most people do not need an ultra low fat
diet. But most of us could improve our diet by cutting out the
junk fats. Basically, these are the processed fats:
hydrogenated fats, polyunsaturated oils that have been heated,
and fats that are combined with junk carbs. Processed fats are
the fats most likely to put on flab and clog your arteries.

Cut the JUNK carbs. Most people do not need an ultra low carb
diet. But unfortunately, so many people who go on a low fat diet
continue to eat highly processed foods – they switch from
processed high-fat to processed low-fat. And when food
manufacturers create low fat foods, they tend to replace the fat
with junk carbs, that tend to pile on the pounds. Basically,
junk carbs are low-fiber carbs. Like sugar, fructose (and all
the other *oses), flour, cornstarch, fruit juice. Yes, fruit
juice is a junk carb too! – After all, how much fiber is there in
fruit juice? – Virtually none – its yet another junk carb. You
should eat the whole fruit instead, with its fiber intact.

Cut the JUNK calories. Most people do not need an ultra low
calorie diet. But just think what your diet would be like if you
dropped the processed fats and the low-fiber carbs. You’d be
eating mainly natural proteins, with lots of vegetables plus
whole fruits – and the odds are that you would be eating far
fewer calories as well. That’s the kind of calorie cutting most
of us should be doing.

Eat a balanced NATURAL-FOODS diet. By natural foods, we mean the
foods that would have been eaten by your hunter-gatherer
ancestors: – lots of whole vegetable foods for vitamins and
fiber; moderate to small portions of meats, fish, seafood, and
other animal and protein foods, grilled, stewed or baked; and
small portions of fresh whole fruit in season. This is the diet
on which the human race evolved, and the diet which, for the vast
majority of people, makes for optimum health

So the next time you’re about to order a meal with fries and
sugary soda, think about how it could be improved. Replace the
fries with a salad, and the soda with mineral water, and you’ve
already made significant progress towards a more healthy,
balanced meal.

And at home, look for recipes that use whole, fresh foods, with a
minimum of processing. Make sure your meals include natural
unprocessed foods, with lots of healthy vegetables, both cooked,
and raw in salads. Avoid processed fats and processed low-fiber
foods.

A sample menu:
– grilled fish with steamed green beans, and peppers
– large mixed salad, dressed with small amounts of olive oil and
vinegar or lemon juice
– fresh fruit platter

Yes – A healthy, balanced diet can be that simple!

The information contained in this article is for educational purposes
only and is not intended to medically diagnose, treat or cure any
disease. Consult a health care practitioner before beginning any
health care program.

About the Author

Emily Clark is editor at Lifestyle Health News and Medical Health News where you can find the most up-to-date advice and information on topical health matters.

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Nutrition, Evolution, and Having a Healthy Diet
Judith Schwader

Nutrition has everything to do with health. This isnt news, exactly, but looking around at the crazy information on the market, one wonders if anyone actually makes the connection: what you eat affects how you feel. Its that simple. Your health depends on the food choices you make in both the short and long term.

Take a pill, and all youve done is treat a symptom. Change your eating habits, and create a lasting change in your well-being. There are so many approaches to eating, however, and so much conflicting information that its come down to this simple question: does whatever youre eating right now make sense?

Well, sense isnt common, and it does depend on some good information. So here is something to consider: what kind of foods are humans evolved to eat? Cheetos? Dont think so. Thats a no-brainer, but what about some others that we counted as healthy staples until recently, like bread and pasta. Go way back in your imagination, to hunter gatherer days before agriculture and the obesity which followed for the first time among humans and consider what would be part of our ancestors normal diet. If youre about to pop something into your mouth that wasnt around before agriculture, (a relatively recent development in human history), then eat it knowing its not considered a normal food by your body. Foods your body considers normal contribute to your health, other foods are either neutral or harmful. How simple is that?

A well-known exploration of this concept that certain foods help our bodies thrive is Dr. Peter DAdamos book, Eat Right 4 Your Type, in which he bases his lists of what to eat and avoid on blood type. DAdamo asserts that type O is the oldest type, and the newer A type didnt show up on the scene until agriculture. So, Os should eat lots of meat and veg because that blood type doesnt know how to handle too much grain. Type As can eat grain, but not dairy. Dairy is a category reserved as a normal food only for the yet more recent human blood type, AB. (Maybe well evolve a new type that can handle Cheetos and red licorice, my personal favorite abnormal foods).

DAdamo supports his blood-type theory with all kinds of careful research, and so what? Does it make sense that humans should rely primarily on foods that occur naturally? Absolutely. If youre going to eat a grain like wheat then, eat it whole, or dont eat it at all, and dont eat much of it anyway because humans pretty much made wheat up! Im not going to take the, Does it occur naturally? debate too far, because its time to look at another researchers take on the food and evolution connection.

Dr. Phillip Lipetz wrote The Good Calorie Diet, a book for the weight loss market, but he also has supported his theories with all kinds of careful research. His describes how the human response to starvation that was developed during the ice age carries on today. Ironic, isnt it, that the food available to us today – rich and sweet and abundant – causes our bodies to behave as though starvation is at hand.

The short story for how this works is that up until the ice age, humans ate whatever was readily available, like roots, plants, fruit, and a little tasty carrion now and then. Along came the ice ages, and those foods became scarce. Now humans were forced to hunt, but it was dicey and the weapons were primitive, so spans of time occured between kills. The result: our ancestors evolved ways to make the most of the conversion of excess blood sugar into stored nutrition in the form of body fat. When they starved, they lived off stored fat.

Todays diet mimics the ice age diet: high fat and high protein, and our genetic programming says, Uh oh, were facing starvation again. Better store up some fat. Lipetz goes into convincing detail about food combinations in his book. He describes some that cause the creation of excess fat, such as butter on bread. More useful are his combinations that actually inhibit fat formation, like lean meat with most vegetables. In a society where obesity and its attendant health issues are rampant, these food combinations are helpful places to focus our attention. Yet the single most useful bit to remember from his research is that foods which cause our bodies to create excess fat all have one thing in common: they werent part of our ancestors normal diet.

Armed with this overview, next time youre about to pop something in your mouth – whether your focus is health or weight you dont need to have a bunch of rules and whacky information in mind. Just use common sense. Ask whether its a food that was around before the advent of agriculture. If it was, go for it. If it wasnt, then consider that your body wont consider the food normal, and in both the long and short run, thats got health consequences.

© 2004 Judith Schwader

Judith Schwader holds a Master’s degree in Education, and has written extensively on health. She has a background in social science and addressing chronic health conditions through nutrition and life style. Judith’s articles appear in: http://QandAHealth.com, and http://masteringyourtime.com.

This article may be reprinted in its entirety so long as this paragraph and the authors credits remain intact.

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How did our family traditions become centered around eating meat? Think about it. When we think of Thanksgiving, we think of turkey. If we eat pork, then New Year’s celebrations often revolve around pork and sauerkraut. At Christian Easter, the traditional meal is ham. And in the summer, we wait for that first hamburger or steak on the grill.

How did that happen to a species that was designed to eat vegetables and fruits, nuts, berries and legumes?

We can imagine that eating meat was initially an opportunistic event, born of the need to survive. The taste of cooked meat, plus the sustained energy that came from eating high-fat meat products made primitive sense even to earliest man.

Initially, finding cooked animal meat, from a forest fire, would have been cause for celebration. It’s something everyone in a clan would have participated in eating together. When man learned to hunt and moved to a hunting orientation, rather than a hunter-gatherer orientation, he would have done this in groups. They would have had to hunt in teams, and killing an animal for food would have been a group effort. Hunting and killing an animal meant food not just for the individual, but for the clan, and would have been cause for celebration when the hunters brought the food home.

If they brought the animal back to the clan, it would have taken a group effort to skin the animal and tear or cut the meat from the carcass. Everyone would have participated in this, and subsequently, shared in the rewards of their work.

It’s easy to see how, once we didn’t have to hunt for meat, but could buy it, the need for gathering and celebration was deeply ingrained in our natures. We celebrate the seasons and life’s events with family and friends, and because those early celebrations involved eating meat, that tradition has continued to modern times.

Tags: Animal Meat, Berries, Carcass, Celebrate The Seasons, Celebration, Celebrations, Christian Easter, Eating Habits, Eating Meat, Family And Friends, Family Traditions, Forest Fire, Fruits And Vegetables, Group Effort, Hunter Gatherer, meat products;, Natures, Orientation, Pork And Sauerkraut, Rewards, Sustained Energy, Vegetables And Fruits —