These ideas are simple, common sense and a good start to eating healthfully!
10 Rules to Eat Safely for Life (and What to Remove From Your Kitchen) (Source: Huffington Post)
Every day you have to navigate a toxic nutritional landscape. You have to hunt and gather in a food desert. You have to survive the American supermarket and dodge the dangers of industrial food. Others are already suffering from an eating disorder for eating to much that they need to look for professional treatment options for eating disorders. Monte Nido Vista in Agoura Hills provides residential eating disorder treatment to adults. Those who have eating disorder can contact the experts.
But I do also have a good news! You’ll just need to follow 10 simple rules so you can eat safely for life.
Think of them as shortcuts or tricks to use when shopping or eating. If you just do these things and nothing else, you will automatically be eating real, fresh food that will prevent, treat and even reverse most of the chronic diseases that drain our energy, stress our families and deplete our economy.
You don’t even have to understand anything about nutrition. Just follow these goof-proof rules for getting healthy, losing weight and feeling great. Ideally have only food without labels in your kitchen or foods that don’t come in a box, a package or a can. There are labeled foods that are great, like sardines, artichoke hearts, or roasted red peppers, but you have to be very smart in reading the labels. When it comes to labels, custom label printing stands out, offering tailored solutions that perfectly match specific branding and information needs.
There are two things to look for: the ingredient list and the nutrition facts. Check out my special report on “How to Read Labels” for more information.
1. Where is the primary ingredient on the list? If the real food is at the end of the list and the sugar or salt is at the beginning, beware. The most abundant ingredient is listed first and the others are listed in descending order by weight. Be conscious, too, of ingredients that may not be on the list; some ingredients may be exempt from labels. This is often true if the food is in a very small package, if it has been prepared in the store, or if it has been made by a small manufacturer. Beware of these foods.
2. If a food has a label it should have fewer than five ingredients. If it has more than five ingredients, throw it out. Also beware of food with health claims on the label. They are usually bad for you — think “sports beverages.” I recently saw a bag of deep-fried potato chips with the health claims “gluten-free, organic, no artificial ingredients, no sugar” and with fewer than five ingredients listed. Sounds great, right? But remember, cola is 100 percent fat-free and that doesn’t make it a health food.
3. If sugar (by any name, including organic cane juice, honey, agave, maple syrup, cane syrup, or molasses) is on the label, throw it out. There may be up to 33 teaspoons of sugar in the average bottle of ketchup. Same goes for white rice and white flour, which act just like sugar in the body. If you have diabesity — the spectrum of metabolic imbalances starting with just a little belly fat, leading all the way to diabetes — you can’t easily handle any flour, even whole-grain. Throw it out.
4. Throw out any food with high-fructose corn syrup on the label. It is a super sweet liquid sugar that takes no energy for the body to process. Some high-fructose corn syrup also contains mercury as a by-product of the manufacturing process. Many liquid calories, such as sodas, juices, and “sports” drinks contain this metabolic poison. It always signals low quality or processed food.
5. Throw out any food with the word hydrogenated on the label. This is an indicator of trans fats, vegetable oils converted through a chemical process into margarine or shortening. They are good for keeping cookies on the shelf for long periods of time without going stale, but these fats have been proven to cause heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. New York City and most European counties have banned trans fats, and you should, too.
6. Throw out any highly-refined cooking oils such as corn, soy, etc. (I explain which oils to buy in Week 1 of the program in my book The Blood Sugar Solution). Also avoid toxic fats and fried foods.
7. Throw out any food with ingredients you can’t recognize, pronounce, or that are in Latin.
8. Throw out any foods with preservatives, additives, coloring or dyes, “natural flavorings,” or flavor enhancers such as MSG (monosodium glutamate).
9. Throw out food with artificial sweeteners of all kinds (aspartame, Splenda, sucralose, and sugar alcohols — any word that ends with “ol” like xylitol, sorbitol). They make you hungrier, slow your metabolism, give you bad gas, and make you store belly fat.
10. If it came from the earth or a farmer’s field, not a food chemist’s lab, it’s safe to eat. As Michael Pollan says, if it was grown on a plant, not made in a plant, then you can keep it in your kitchen. If it is something your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food, throw it out (like a “lunchable” or go-gurt”). Stay away from “food-like substances.”
That’s it — just 10 simple goof-proof rules for staying healthy for life. It is a simple recipe for staying out of trouble and automatically leads you to a real whole foods diet. And the side effect will be weight loss, energy, reduction in the need for medication and saving our nation from the tsunami of chronic disease and Pharmageddon!
When you make these simple choices you will not only improve your health, and your family’s health, but you will create a “wellness spring” that will shift the demand in the marketplace. You will not only take back your health, but also help America take back its health. You vote three times a day with your fork and it impacts our health, how we grow food, energy consumption, climate change and environmental degradation. You have more power than you think. Use it!
My personal hope is that together we can create a national conversation about a real, practical solution for the prevention, treatment, and reversal of our obesity, diabetes and chronic disease epidemic.
Now I’d like to hear from you:
What are your rules for eating heathy for life?
How have you transformed your health with food?
Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below.
To your good health,
Mark Hyman, MD
To learn more and to get a free sneak preview of The Blood Sugar Solution go to www.drhyman.com.
Mark Hyman, M.D. is a practicing physician, founder of The UltraWellness Center, a four-timeNew York Times bestselling author, and an international leader in the field of Functional Medicine. You can follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, watch his videos on YouTube, become a fan on Facebook, and subscribe to his newsletter.
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Christy says
I’ve really been enjoying reading the articles and such you post Shanti. I definitely agree that there are some no-brainers when it comes to eating and what to avoid… especially stuff like HF Corn Syrup, fake sugars, etc. But at the same time, I have a hard time reconciling some of these guidelines, etc with real life.
I live in a 3rd world country, where even if I wanted to eat Paleo, I couldn’t. First, many of the acceptable foods are not available at all and secondly, the cost would be prohibitive! (It might cost a ton there to buy the meat and organic products, but here it would cost almost twice as much!)
But more than that, I think about the people who live here (and in other 3rd world countries around the world). If this is the only way to eat healthfully, what hope does the majority of the world have? Where I live, white rice (a big no-no according to these guidelines) is a main staple. People here subsist on a diet made up primarily of starchy/carb food (taro, sweet potatoes, yams). Protien/meat is a “special occasions only” treat. And even for those who have access to stores, meat is something that few can afford to regularly buy.
Granted, Dairy is not a part of the diet, and sugar isn’t a huge part (although most people grow sugar cane and chew that up and get all those sugars).
So I guess I’m just curious as to what your thoughts might be….. is there any hope/possibility for eating healthy in a poverty-filled, 3rd world country? If this is the only safe/good way to eat, how does that take into account how the vast majority of people in the world have to live?
(I totally understand that at home in the US (western world) there are many, many more processed/fake foods available that aren’t necessarily in a 3rd world country)
Just curious! =)
radlandon says
Hi, Christy! Here is a good article that talks about rice consumption in Asia. Obviously not 3rd world, but I think there are some points to be gleaned. http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-asian-paradox-how-can-asians-eat-so-much-rice-and-not-gain-weight/#axzz1leprzLfy
I truly believe different people types are meant to eat different foods. I don’t think a “no-grain, no-dairy, no-sugar” diet works for everyone or *should* work for everyone. In developing countries, or 3rd world countries, people *work* for their food. They are out hunting, gathering, cooking, etc. It’s when the western diet gets introduced to them and takes over that I feel problems begin to arise. I am a BIG supporter of Weston A. Price. Have you heard of him? He was a dentist who traveled the world in the early 1900s studying tribes and peoples who had little to no disease. His findings are fascinating. You can read about his foundation here: http://www.westonaprice.org/about-the-foundation/about-the-foundation
So, that’s kind of a brief summation of how I feel about it. I think the main point is eating whole, nourishing foods as close to their source as possible, and I would imagine in your situation, you are getting a lot of that. I know a lot of times it can seem an elitist point of view to preach about organic produce, grass fed meats, etc. But I feel you make changes where possible, and just do the best you can. For us, we didn’t have many options since Chris was so sick. He’s mentioned multiple times that it’s his dream to get back out doing short-term missions again, but fears he will never be able to since he’s allergic to so many things. So, that’s a prayer I have for him–that he would heal enough that we can travel the world together again someday doing the Lord’s work!
Hope that helps!
Shanti
Christy says
Thanks, Shanti! I haven’t had a chance to read the articles you posted yet, but I will. Have a great week! =)