Best Tips for Healthy Eating

I’ve been trying to eat healthy for over 30 years now…

But there is so much information out there about the “right” and healthy diet - what to eat and what not to eat, and a lot of it is incorrect, contradicting, or relevant to certain people but not to others…

So… my question to you is…
From your experience, what would be your top 3 healthy eating recommendations…?

My top recommendations are in the first comment…

I am gonna start…

My top 3 recommendations for healthy eating:
1. No sugar
2. No processed food
3. Intermittent fasting (we eat breakfast and lunch within a 6 hour window, and fast for 18 hours until next breakfast).

I’m not claiming that this will work for anyone else… but these are best for my wife and I (we’re very different body types, compositions, appetite, and age…)

Looking forward to read your experiences…

I would love to read your tips/recommendations/advice for what to eat, what not to eat, when to eat, how to eat (chewing well, for example)…
Thank you so much…

my question to you is…
From your experience, what would be your top 3 healthy eating recommendations…?

!. Meat
2. Cheese
3. Eggs

My tip would be to go through the cabinets and fridge and throw away all the stuff that is deemed to not be healthy.

In my opinion, if you want to maintain your health, you need to.....
Fish
Meat
Eggs
These must be eaten.

as a  general rule..

if an ingredient has an abundance of Xs, Zs or numbers in it.. or if you have trouble pronouncing it ...  try your best to avoid ingesting it  

My top tip - Eat 30 different fruit and veg a week. Practicing permaculturists know that variety is key, steer clear of mono-crops, fill your fruit forest with lots of different species. Same goes for you gut biome. There’s a direct link between low number of species in your gut and many western diseases - obesity, inflammation, diabetes, etc. Our gut biome likes variety, instead we feed it the same food week in week out, often with preservatives, trace amounts of pesticides and antibiotics, and we end up with fewer species in our gut and declining health.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Spector" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Tim Spector and highly respected epidemiologist has conducted long term twin studies. He investigate the world of diets after a stroke. He wanted to know how to loose weight. He used his research and team and made some interesting discoveries. He looked into the gut biome of identical twins and found that a healthier and lighter twin was eating 30 or more different fruit and veg than their heavier and less healthy sibling who was on average 10kg heavier. You can hear what he has to say here



30 might sound hard, but it’s not. I get creative with nuts and seeds, frozen berries and mixing up recipes. Yesterday I had porridge with blueberries, walnuts and sunflower seeds, this morning I had a smoothie with banana, pumpkin seeds, almonds and frozen raspberries. That’s 8 in two meals.

It’s easy to swap out a staple veg in a recipe especially soups and stews. I tend to shop every other day, so I just keep a record of the fruit I’ve eaten and pick somethings I haven’t had that week. My favourite food recipe website makes it easy when I’m lacking creativity or inspiration - www.dishingupthedirt.com

I was excited to see this thread! I'm a licensed nutritionist with a clinical practice for about 10 yrs now. Reading the replies here it looks like permies all know a good amount about nutrition because these are all things I regularly recommend!

If anyone is interested I write a weekly nutrition column free of charge for local papers who don't have big pockets to help regular folk who may not otherwise have access to preventative healthcare. It's called Ask The Nutritionist. I answer reader questions about nutrition. Currently it's only published in a few papers in Canada but I'm looking to expand its reach if anyone can recommend papers or publications. My aim is to keep it free. Okay, my top 3 food related health recommendations are:

Real food can be picked or dug up or fished or hunted. It does not come from a factory in a box or package.
Food is only as good as the soil its grown in or the quality of the environment in which its raised (when talking about animals). Sick soil, bad feed, commercial feedlots make sick food. Sick food makes sick people.
Humans are omnivores. For optimal health that should include nose to tail animal matter from a variety of properly raised animals or seafood and a variety of plants and fruits in their natural state, raw or cooked.

Namaste!

I see my grammar mistakes in that response. It's not its. Sorry!

Michelle De Long wrote:I see my grammar mistakes in that response. It's not its. Sorry!

No worries Michelle - I didn't notice but then my brain skips over my own mistakes. You can always hit the little three dots at the top right of a post and then there's an edit option. However, you can't delete a post so you can't edit your original and then delete your second post. So just leave things as they are.

Good tips, especially the nose to tail - I'm making pate this weekend with lots of organ meat.

I would recommend https://nutritionfacts.org/ which is a non-profit site run by active and retired doctors who review the mountains of nutrition research out there looking for quality science on what works. All their info is free and there are no ads or financial conflicts of interest.

Overall the message I see there is that a "whole food, plant-based" diet has the most benefits and least downsides relative to the rest. They have a "daily dozen" dietary checklist to aim for, and there's a free app with no ads called DailyDozen if you want to track it. He has also published the 'How Not to Die' and 'How Not to Diet' books, proceeds going to charity, both of which I thought were good. The latter is a cookbook.

I'm subscribed to his Youtube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/c/NutritionfactsOrgMD ), as well as the Whole Food Plant Based Cooking Show: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheWholeFoodPlantBasedCookingShow and she also has a cookbook that has a lot of good recipes, which have no sugar or oils added. All her recipes are on Youtube for free as well.

James MacKenzie wrote:as a  general rule..

if an ingredient has an abundance of Xs, Zs or numbers in it.. or if you have trouble pronouncing it ...  try your best to avoid ingesting it  

Sir, Xs, Zs, It would be helpful for us to have a detailed discussion of this.

On top of the "what to eat" advice already given, I'll add:
1. Eat when calm
2. Enjoy good company.
3. Stop eating before you're stuffed

There have been studies that show close relationships, family ties, community, etc. are extremely beneficial for heart health (and health in general) even if nutrition is subpar. Eating when rushed, angry, or stressed impedes digestion. And frequently overeating places a heavy burden on digestive organs.

N. Neta wrote:
My top 3 recommendations for healthy eating:
1. No sugar
2. No processed food
3. Intermittent fasting (we eat breakfast and lunch within a 6 hour window, and fast for 18 hours until next breakfast).

I like your perspective, mine is a bit different but with much the same consequences in terms of daily choices:
1) Recognize your sugar cravings, but understand where they are coming from
Consider your body fat a power reserve, like a battery. That fat battery has between 60 and 100 times the power/gram energy capacity of a commercial lithium cell so if you carry around 25kg of fat that's the equivalent of 1.8 tons of Tesla model 3 batteries. Sweet cravings with that amount of backup power seems more likely to be a sign of faulty battery access than an actual energy need. If you crave sweets and feel tired despite having such a huge energy reserve something has to be up with that and it's a really good idea to find out why your body is making you crave fuel.
2) Be realistic with food, processed food is convenient but also tainted in unobvious ways:
If your only obligation to your shareholders were to sell as many candybars as possible would you sell candybars that actually worked well to refill a human body with energy, or would you sell broken-fuel candybars that sends the signal to the human body as if it is indeed refilling you with energy (sweet satiating dopamine) but fill it with trans fat and vegetable oils that impair human lipid metabolism so that they get the instant energy top up, but at the cost of wrecking their "battery access" meaning impaired lipid metabolism so that they soon need another candybar, and another, and another. I dislike conspiracy theories, but none the less a lot of what passes as food is damaging in really unobvious ways. However what happens to people that eat a lot of it for a long time is far from unobvious.
3)Eat intuitively, but you're not a cow so do not graze like one.
You can make a healthy person diabetic in 4 day's by giving them a glucose drop that does pumps them with carbs for 96 hours straight, humans have never had constant access to food during the day and our body is simply not designed to handle it well. Allow yourself to go hungry once in a while, it's better when you're not busy. Allow your body the best possible odd's at navigating what is good for it, that's what your tongue and sense of smell is for so don't confuse it with MSG and other frankenfoods.

Michael Pollan has some terse advice in his book Food Rules: An Eater's Manual:

Eat real food,
Mostly plants,
Not too much.

This is taken from the following article:
https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/michael-pollans-rules-eating

“It’s much simpler than people think,” [says Pollan]. "We have done an amazing job in this society of complicating what for every other animal is a pretty straightforward process: finding a suitable diet, enjoying it, and moving on... When I tried to figure out if I could offer any really simple guidance for eating, it came down to seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Lots of good replies here. I would agree that meat, eggs and cheese are high on my list paired with mostly non-starchy vegetables and fruit.

While I think that it's great when people find out what works for them, I would add that we are all different. My experience with blood sugar issues differs from Simon Olesen. Grazing keeps my blood sugar from spiking that is my personal experience from testing an hour after eating for a fair amount of time. I feel very ill if I get too hungry and that leads to poor food choices as well as ruining my day.

I suggest keeping a food diary along with how different foods/meals make you feel, physically and emotionally. If you are unsatisfied or angry after finishing your meal, I find it unlikely that would be a sustainable diet.

Stacy Witscher wrote:Grazing keeps my blood sugar from spiking that is my personal experience from testing an hour after eating for a fair amount of time. I feel very ill if I get too hungry and that leads to poor food choices as well as ruining my day.

I cannot wait too long when I am hungry either. Not only do I get cranky, but I feel shaky and get headaches. BUT it depends highly on what I eat if those feelings hit before time or not. For example, with my normal breakfast of porridge with nuts and fruits I will only have a small snack before lunch, if any. But if a member of the family has birthday and we eat cake for breakfast, my bloodsugar first spikes and then plummets and I need a substantial snack earlier.
So for me the more complex the carbs are and the more variety a meal has, the more it "keeps" till the next meal.

Paul's latest podcast dives into the potential health benefits of organic food with Cat, the cook for the SKIP event:

https://permies.com/wiki/222732/Podcast-Cat-SKIP-Diet-podlet