What is a healthy diet?

Uncomfortable answers to questions/17 January 2021

A few years ago, we had to create a profession and certain rules to tell people what to eat. Everyone eats one way or another: some people have one meal, some have endless snacks, some eat the usual three meals. All of this once carried the term "food pyramid". This term was first introduced in 1991 in the U.S. and it was not an applied story, because everyone saw a triangle, which is unclear how it could be applied to life. Now it’s called the "nutrition plate" where the triangle has been transformed literally into a plate that a person sees and on which they stack different food groups. The more diverse the plate is, the more there is an understanding of what’s in it, and virtually every food is similar to its original form - you can develop a healthy attitude towards the approach to eating.

If we take away the marketing, the advertising, the superfoods, the belief in a single diet or a diet that works for everyone - what we are left with is a healthy fridge that has all of these 5 food groups in it. And it’s critical that we actually have them in their entirety - all 5. Even if it’s just one food at a time, a healthy diet is a varied diet. Because the body drinks up the benefits when we grind (chew with our teeth) different! types of foods.

A healthy refrigerator always has at least half of the fresh group at all times:

• vegetables, any greens
• berries, fruits
• cereals, legumes
• eggs, fish, seafood
• poultry, meat
• seeds, nuts
• oils (for dressing/cooking)

Healthy eating absolutely always goes hand in hand with variety/rotation, so it’s a bad strategy to eat monotonously, even when choosing the healthiest foods. Broccoli and rice and wild bird, a handful of nuts and a grapefruit day in and day out because you read it’s healthy - won’t work. The norm for today: today I eat fish, tomorrow poultry, the day after tomorrow I might finish that poultry, then I’ll have beans or lentils, after that I’ll go back to fish, next some vegetarian sources, but the more varied the better.

At consultations I very often ask to establish a sense of a healthy fridge and priority vector, because someone may not like something from a number of products, but at the initial stage we take each group and put there the maximum number of products that are available and with a certain budget.
If I’m talking about cereals - that would be 7 porridges, a new one every day.
Definitely 7 different cereals a week will be much better and healthier than one expensive and beautiful one.

Further, the choice is up to you.

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