How to Eat Food: The Truth!
The modern American diet is flawed from it's foundation. The Food Pyramid the government puts out has "grains" at it's base, and tells us that this category includes things like bread, pasta, and other flour-based food. The problem is that flour and sugar are basically treated the same way by your body -- they're both incredibly easy-to-digest carbohydrates that spike your blood insulin levels, which results in all kinds of horrible problems from diabetes to depression.
The more accurate pyramid would have vegetables at the base. Vegetables are the only sources of many nutrients. It's critically important to eat a wide variety of colors of vegetable, as every color is associated with a different set of vitamins and minerals, and your body needs a staggering variety of those nutrients.
The pyramid would then step up to meat. Not necessarily steak and lamb, but actual animal proteins are one of the best conveyors of nutrients. Animals graze from plants, and they pack the vitamins and minerals from lots of those plants into a more dense form, so meat from a well-fed animal is better for you than the plants they ate. Unfortunately, most animals that we eat don't eat the variety of vegetables that we need to, so eating meat doesn't replace the need for veggies -- but it drastically reduces it.
The pyramid should then move to fruit. Fruit is like vegetables in many respects, but higher in sugar (specifically fructose). Fructose, while men need some for sexual purposes, is largely useless to the body, and hard on the liver in large quantities. Fortunately, eating a few fruits every day isn't enough to cause any harm, and fruits make great desserts while conveying nutrition in a way that a brownie just can't. (That said, eat chocolate. Just eat DARK chocolate. It's heart-healthy and good for you in several other ways, too. Just don't eat more than about 2~3 ounces each day.)
Then, up at the top of the pyramid, is WHOLE grains. Not flour; not sugar -- WHOLE grains. These aren't even necessary, but they make good vehicles for other food. "Sprouted" grains, such as Sprouted Wheat Bread and Sprouted Corn Tortillas, should form the bulk of your 'Get this other good food into my mouth" food -- which you really should try to avoid altogether, but it's difficult.
Following this nutrition strategy, it's easy to find yourself off of your prescription drugs, away from your doctor, and waking up every morning feeling great!
What You'll Find Here
My 5 best tips for staying healthy
If you're trying to stay healthy in a life-long fashion, reducing your medical bills and your chances of early death, there are 5 simple nutritional rules to follow:1) Eat whole foods. People say "whole foods" all the time, but no one stops to think what that means about healthy food. Eating foods that weren't grown in a lab and haven't been taken apart and put back together, that's what it means. So no dehydrated-rehydrated potatoes, no homogenized milk, no flour, no sugar, and absolutely no corn syrup, high-fructose or otherwise.
2) Eat foods in as close to their natural state as possible. This sounds a lot like "eat whole foods", but it's a supplemental rule. Not only should your foods be whole, but they should be fresh, and cooked as little as possible. For millions of years, humans ate what they hunted and gathered without the benefit of stoves and ovens, much less food processors and blenders. Evolution hasn't had a chance to 'catch up' to modern appliances: we still digest food in the same way our ancestors did. This is not to say "don't chop your red peppers" or "don't eat cheese because it's not raw milk". These are still healthy foods; eating them is just fine. Just eat your veggies barely-steamed or your meat almost-too-raw. Your body will get so much more out of them, you'll feel the difference.
3) Don't eat anything you can't buy. That is to say, if you can't buy a bag of pure sodium erythorbate or a dollop of hydroxypropylmethelcellulose, you shouldn't eat anything that has those ingredients in them. It's not healthy. Food eating should fill you with ingredients that are created by nature, not by a lab. (Note: you can go out and buy a bottle of MSG -- but you should avoid it anyway.)
4) There are only two real "food groups": Things that Move and Things that Grow. Of the "things that move" food group, you should strive to get about equal amounts of fat and protein. This goes directly against the 'fat-is-bad' propaganda of the day, but it's demonstrably true.
5) Of the "things that grow" group, you should deliberately eat as many different colors of plant as possible every day. Veggie colors form because of different substances in the plant; each substance represents a group of nutrients. Your body gets nutrients from meat, but not as much as you get from fresh fruits and veggies, so it's important to get a variety - you don't want to overload on some nutrients and leave others off, that's not healthy food eating.
Follow those 5 tips, and you'll be well on your way to a healthy life, and saying goodbye to your doctor for the rest of your life! More information on this lifestyle is available at www.majesstix.com/how2eatfood.
The Booklist
Stuff Every American Needs to Read
Pottenger's Cats: A Study in Nutrition
Amazon Price: $9.95 (as of 11/26/2009) 
Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats
Amazon Price: $17.82 (as of 11/26/2009)
Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage)
Amazon Price: $11.53 (as of 11/26/2009)
The Diet Cure
Amazon Price: $10.88 (as of 11/26/2009)
Sugar Blues
Amazon Price: $6.99 (as of 11/26/2009)
What do you think?
I'm firmly on the "carbs=death" side of the equation. Check the books list, below, for ample evidence that the American obsession with pasta, bread, and other flour- and sugar-based "vehicle" foods is killing us. Cholesterol is actually necessary for brain development, reparing internal injuries, and arterial health. Fat, on the other hand, has gotten a bad rep because of bad science and nothing else.
Low fat? Low carb? Does it matter?
Fetching blurbs now... please stand byFat causes heart disease, cholesterol, and death!
Flour and sugar cause heart disease and death -- cholesterol is a myth!
This is a Bad Science lens
Check out others in the collection
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Autism and Vaccines
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This lens is all about seeking the facts about the autism and vaccine link. Facts are hard to find in this controversy, with both sides pointing at the absence of facts as though failing to prove something is proof of the opposite. My goal is to say...
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What is ethanol? Is it for real?
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Ethanol is becoming a common word these days, despite the fact that it's been around since the first Model-Ts rolled off the Ford production line nearly a century ago. Pundits, politicians, and econauts alike are hailing ethanol as the vehicle of Ame...
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When Science Goes Wrong
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This is the motherlens of the Bad Science lenscluster. I am not anti-science. Nor, despite what I may say about specific viewpoints or specific people, am I politically-inclined at all. I believe, however, that a force greater than the politics and t...
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The Diabetes Control Diet (Type 2, of course.)
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Fortunately, living does not require carbohydrates -- and thus does not require insulin. Keep reading to learn, in layman's terms, how you can leave sugary and flour-filled foods behind, and leave insulin behind, too. (This is a Bad Science lens.)
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Global Warming
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We hear about it every day, through every media outlet that exists. The world is getting hotter, ice caps are melting, polar bears are going to be extinct. All very dramatic; dramatic enough to have a movie made about it. But, inconvenience aside, wh...
