Common Sense Nutrition Part 2
In part 1 I stated that nutrition is simple and that as human beings we know how to do it. I talked about the importance of using your own common sense and intuition, of daring to experiment and of trusting your own experience.
With all that in mind, let me now ask you very directly: What should we eat in order to maintain ideal health and fertility? Try to keep it simple and to the obvious.
….
Exactly: Food
That sounds so obvious, yet in this day and age it’s actually something quite rare, because most people live more on edible food products than on real food.
We can get so focused on calories that we might make really poor food choices, like choosing artificially sweetened foods over foods containing natural sugar, low fat over whole fat or carbohydrates over proteins and fats. Maybe you drink coffee or smoke in order to suppress appetite. Or you have two pieces of cake and nothing else in a whole day (been there, done that).
However, food is much more than just calories or fuel. Food is information that talks to our cells. The idea that all calories are equal is simply outdated science. A calorie from a coke is very different from a calorie from butter or from a carrot. Foods high in sugar or artificial sweeteners trigger certain hormonal releases that not only wrack havoc on your health in the long term, but also increase your body’s tendency to store fat and to not build muscle. Your black coffee with 0 calories might thus end up completely high-jacking your metabolism. Whereas foods high in fat and calories might actually help balance and boost your metabolism and even increase your fat burning capacity.
The most important advice when it comes to food is to eat natural Real Food and to drop industrially processed, nutrient-devoid, fake food products.
What’s the difference between natural food and edible food products?
When it comes to the difference between natural Real Food and edible food products, it’s as simple as looking at each and every food category and choosing the most natural foods from each. Some examples:
- Real fruits and vegetables as opposed to juices, canned or powdered ones.
- Real whole, raw milk and cheese as opposed to their low fat and (ultra) pasteurized variants.
- Real, natural, whole fat yogurt as opposed to low fat, aspartame sweetened fruit yogurts.
- Real, whole grains and bread made in a traditional way, like real sourdough bread, as opposed to refined white bread with a list of 20 ingredients that might have never even been touched by a baker.
- Real butter as opposed to margarine made from cheap vegetable oils
- Real grass-fed meat and poultry as opposed to their factory-farmed counterparts or soy-meat alternatives.
- Real cuts of meat as opposed to highly processed meat products.
- Real fruit, real honey and dark chocolate as nature’s candy as opposed to refined sugar, artificial sweeteners and all that artificially colored candy.
You get the idea.
In order to distinguish a natural food from a food product, ask yourself the following questions:
- Does it have ingredients or is it the ingredient?
- Does it have more than 5 ingredients?
- Are the ingredients unpronounceable?
- Would your grand-grandmother recognize the food?
- Is it grown in nature? Or does it come from a laboratory or factory ?
- Is it grown grown with pesticides, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), unnecessary medication (such as antibiotics), artificial additives or hormones?
- If there was no supermarket system, could you grow it yourself or buy it from your neighbor who grows it?
- Could you produce it in your own kitchen?
Applying these criteria already eliminates most products in a typical supermarket. Does that mean you cannot eat anything anymore?? Absolutely not. In fact, you can eat anything on the fertile food plan, just not in any quality or quantity! Rather than feeling deprived ( = in scarcity), focus on re-discover the abundance and great taste of natural, pure, unprocessed food. You can even learn how to create delicious version of almost all your favorite foods with only natural ingredients. After some time, you will most likely not even want anything else anymore…
While we can certainly benefit from modern inventions, we should always remain aware of and respect our physiology as human beings, the foods that we evolved on and the needs our body has for ideal health and fertility. For most of human existence people lived on natural food. More, they actually lived on regenerative and fertile food, an important distinction that we are going to look deeper into in part 3.
