There are new paradigms, big changes, and a whole lot of rethinking going on in the world of food. Genetically modified foods are different from those that have been selective bred. “Natural” foods mean nothing when looking for foods that are healthful, because things like arsenic and sugar are “natural.” They are found in nature, but they are not good to eat. On the other hand, rich, thick cream is a fantastic food! So is lard, and bacon. Who knew?
You may have heard of the “paleo” diet, but only some paleo advocates understand the evolutionary basis of the nutrition that supports life-long health. In a future lesson, I’ll share what I know of the intense research done by Weston A. Price, a dentist. Most of his research was done nearly a hundred years ago, and culminated in his1939 publication of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. This book details a series of ethnographic nutritional studies he performed across diverse cultures, which were selected because they were the least changed and most isolated from outsiders, including small groups of indigenous people from 14 locations all over the world. Until recently he appears to have been ignored, but other cleaver researchers are again seeing without the blinders and influences of corporate interests.
If you are eating a plant-based diet: GREAT! You should be. However, if you are vegan, you probably know how difficult it is to get all the necessary nturients when animal sources are totally avoided. We evolved eating animal protein and saturated fats. These provide some nutrients that plants can’t, especially if our health is sub-optimal, such as during middle age, when some metabolic pathways don’t function well.
Forced by my own daughter’s health challenges, I have read many dozens of books, and thousands of web-pages over the past 3 years, leading to fundamental changes in our family’s regular diet.
Our health and vitality has improved in many amazing ways in these few years and I now truly believe that most of us can either cure or improve many of the syndromes that we are currently living with and can even expect to limit or remove medications from our daily lives by making some simple changes that increase our consumption of nutrient dense foods. Even people who don’t have health issues or who are too young to notice them would do well to eat in ways that will keep them in optimal health. It is harder to notice “better” health when it is already pretty good. My 64 year-old body, however, has been able to give me great feedback on what makes me feel significantly stronger physically and mentally.
Over the next year, I will regularly provide short lessons on the changes I have discovered and applied that I think will be most useful to the general population. I will refer to papers in The Urantia Book occasionally as well. I no longer believe that the “message” of the UB teachings is that we should strive to be vegetarian or even vegan, which I believed for many years. I will also be providing book reviews, web-sites, and explanations for the suggestions I make, as many of them are not what currently passes for conventional
Let’s start with the five most important steps to improving our everyday diet:
- Personally prepare as much of the food you eat as you possibly can: convenience and packaged foods contain things you should NOT be eating.
- Dramatically reduce the “empty carbs.” These foods include anything with sugar and starch (in their many, many forms), which includes all wheat and other grain products. Buy half as much bread, pasta, rice, white potato, and other “white” food products next year, then cut it in half again, and again, over the next couple of years. Do the same with all the desserts. That will wipe out a whole lot of meals and foods most of us have been eating. Learn to like water: completely ditch sodas and other sugar drinks (also known as “liquid candy”). Sugar messes up your body horrifically; starches all turn to sugar pretty fast in the metabolic process. Once your taste buds adjust to less sugar, a lemon wedge squeezed into a glass of water tastes great!
- Don’t buy anything that contains soybeans or soybean oil, even in restaurants. Soy is a great legume for nitrogen-fixing our soils. It is not a good food. Search “problems with soy” before you ever buy any more, and I think, like me, you will not “reduce your intake of soy,” you will eliminate it.
- Don’t buy canola oil or foods that contain it. Read labels, if soybean or canola oil is in a product then don’t buy it! Don’t reduce the consumption of these high-heat, high profit, manufactured oils. Eliminate them. They contain trans-fat (even when the label say 0% trans-fats; their manucturers know how to legally lie). Eating trans-fats is like eating plastic.
- Replace all those empty carbs, the soy products, and the manufactured “vegetable oils” with nutrient dense foods:
- leafy greens and other fresh, organic veggies of every color
- sweet potatoes and yams are better than white potatoes
- raw milk, cheese, butter, cream and other high quality animal fats
- pastured meats and eggs from pastured chickens, and non-farmed fish.
Eating animal products that come from feedlots or tiny cages is not only cruel to the animals, but you are still eating the soy-food that has been fed to them, which is not good. Yes, you will pay more for high quality, real food. But you will either pay a bit more now, or far more later for pharmaceuticals and nursing-care, which will be the result of eating lower quality foods.
Your body does not need much animal protein, the bulk of your diet should be plant based: lots and lots of veggies, olive oil, coconut oil, avocados, nuts, and legumes. I will be talking more about the huge importance of such things as fermented foods and bone broths in future columns. It is all about nutrient density.
Some people want more study, more data, and are not sure about some of this advice. Other investigators have made excellent cases that we have abundant proof that we need to go back to what has been working well during the previous 50,000 generations. Stay tuned, I think you will agree.
9 thoughts on “The New, New World of Nutrition”
Wow ….. Claudia, you inspire me! You’re my new world nutrition guru. Thanks for sharing your well digested wisdom with us here. Looks like I’m in need of a total dietary make-over, so I’ll be following along in hopes of tuning up this temporary life vehicle 🙂
Tony, Claudia single-handedly changed my opinion about food a couple of years ago. When you start reading the books and eating the foods it just makes so much sense! My sister now raises chickens and pigs for our family, we get eggs from a local woman who has a couple dozen free-range chickens (as in, we see them pecking away in the field as we drive home from work each day), grow our own veges as much as possible, make bone broth in the crock pot twice a month.
Don’t eat wheat and soy? Two crop most likely grown the Garden of Eden? Were Adam and Eve wrong?
I just double checked: soy, soybean, and soybeans are not words found in the UB. This does not mean soy wasn’t in the Garden, but I personally doubt that it was. I would agree that wheat was likely grown in the Garden of Eden, as it has a much longer history with humans, especially in the Occident. Soy, however, does not have a long history in the human diet. FYI, virtually all soy-based foods are genetically modified today.
Adam and Eve had the Tree of Life and were pure violet race people. They could eat fruit and nuts and be satisfied, but most of us would not be similarly sustained over the full course of our lives. I so encourage soy eaters to literally google: “problems with soy.” At least read the stuff on Mercola.com and this page:
http://www.optimumchoices.com/Soy.htm
A whole book covers the topic; I couldn’t put the book down and every single word: The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food, by Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, CCN. I repeat, unless fermented properly, I will never knowingly consume soy. It is NOT a good food, because the limited benefits are FAR out-weighed by the many harmful side-effects. Corporate America pushes soy because profit comes first in their world.
Now a little more info on wheat: besides containing gluten, it has many more problems today due to the selective breading that makes it better for mixing with sugar to make desserts than for baking into the hearty breads of our ancestors. Yes, whole grain is slightly better than the highly refined stuff; but NO wheat is the best path for gluten sensitive people (most of us), unless you can find some old strain to bake with. All of us are better off cutting back on wheat dramatically.
William Davis, MD, tells more than you will ever wan to know in his book — Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health.
It’s about 300 pages (and, again, I have read every word) and tells many a story about how today’s wheat does far, far more damage than you might expect. Just check out the summary and all the book reviews on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1609614798
What Adam and Eve ate worked for them; but it won’t work for the rest of us because we are not pure violet race peoples and we don’t have access to the Tree of Life.
Keep reading the column Jonathan, and thanks for the question; I’ve changed my own mind about quite a few things. The new information has benefited me greatly. I’ll be sharing a wide variety of thoughts about food and nutrition, mostly based on books published in the last several years.
Thank your for this informative article. I very much appreciates the links to see what makes SOY so yukkie for human consumption. At the SDA church school I attended in my teens we were basically fed on these so-called TRUE-FOODS (YUK again…when I think back upon all the soy and TVP we were fed just to fulfill Ellen White’s so-called health-gospel 🙁 ) And then I’m starting to wonder where on earth they got those so-called health-ideas from?
One question, though; you wrote:
“I no longer believe that the “message” of the UB teachings is that we should strive to be vegetarian or even vegan, which I believed for many years.”
May I ask what ever got you thinking the above?
I’m also looking forward to read more of your health-based articles…
I would just like to comment that when Ellen White was writing about health reform, there was no such thing as TVP or veggie-meat. I think the whole point was leaving flesh foods altogether, not trying to simulate them with other dangerous substances. What your church leaders did does not necessarily speak for her (indeed, what adventists and other christians do rarely speaks for the truth of the Bible). She was writing about what is now called “intermittent fasting”, eliminating sugars (desserts), and avoiding pharmaceuticals in favour of treating disease through diet, exercise, sunshine, clean water, and proper sleep, LONG before the rest of the world came around to it and proved the health benefits of these practices through scientific research. And in fact I came to this site looking for a reference of hers that bone broth is sometimes necessary for people who are ill. Basically… don’t hate on Ellen White! 🙂
Hi Arno,
Thank you for your feedback.
Many of us in the 70’s got the impression that the UB was trying to move us in the direction of vegetarianism. We felt there was a message: Jesus a couple of times shared a meatless passover with his followers, Adam and Eve ate only fruit and nuts (and from the tree of life), and the whole garden of Eden thing implied veggies only to me and many of my UB friends. I got into tofu big time, used it in a recipe to make my own wedding cake. I tried to be a good vegetarian, but it really didn’t work for me. Because, as I now know, I need fat soluble vitamins to be healthy.
I should have used the word “impression” not “message” to convey the idea that a lot of us though the UB was encouraging vegetarian diets based on what we read. Only in more careful reading do I see that it clearly shows that the evolutionary races evolved on meat, Jesus himself was a fisherman, and that Adam and Eve and their children had resources that we do not… again, the tree of life.
Yes, now we see that yukky soy (at least the unfermented stuff) puts our health at risk; and that MOST of us were sold on it by the industry which profits from it… while some of us were influenced by Ellen White. Do you know that William Sadler knew her quite well; breaking from her and the SDA church after unresolvable conflicts emerged?
Anyway, glad you are getting something from this… I’m almost done with the 3rd article… on sugar.
Claudia, Hi 🙂
Thank you for responding to my questions, and clarification on where you girls and guys got the impression from that the UB promoted vegetarianism. (I was just tickled in a nice way when I read about that idea in a positive way, of course…)
Yes, I’m aware that Doc Sadler was rather close to Ellen White and all the sad-history surrounding it all. Actually the fact that he actually was a contemporary of Ellen and how he went about trying to get clarity about quite a few matters, from her, bolstered my resolve re the Papers as well as the veracity of it all. heh heh heh God moves in mysterious ways….
Again, thanks for the very interesting articles.
Hi Claudia,
Thank you so much for your informative article. Since hitting my late 30s I’ve been trying to eat more healthy foods. I’m especially interested in your upcoming article on sugar. What do you think about stevia?
Regards,
Richard