What Should I Eat for Optimum Health?

Do you find it confusing to decide what foods will best nourish your body? There are many conflicting opinions out there: some suggest that you to eat raw, while others champion some cooked foods, some defend vegan or vegetarian, others meat. I suggest that the best answers explore what helps you learn what’s best for you and your body and encourages the use of local, naturally unprocessed foods.

Each of us is biochemically unique. We have particular dietary needs that depend on our metabolism, our ancestral heritage, our blood type, how and where we live and what activities we do. Just because a certain diet is right for someone else doesn’t make it right for you. A

Louise Gittleman wrote an excellent little book “Your Body Knows Best” that describes the inter-relationship of all these factors in what to eat. She encourages us to trust ourselves by paying attention to how we feel when we eat a particular diet or after we eat certain foods.

Having been through food allergies and sensitivities in my twenties, plus hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, and low cholesterol issues in my forties, I’ve tried many different ways of eating and of using supplements. I have finally come to some clarity about what works and doesn’t work for my body. Through trial and error, I’ve found that I only thrive on a high protein, high fat, and low carbohydrate diet. I eat fermented foods, avoid gluten, dairy and sugar, eat locally raised organic meat and wild fish, do best with lots of vegetables, raw and cooked that grow above ground (as opposed to root vegetables) and don’t eat much fruit or grains. That’s what works for my body. You will need to find out what works for you as each of us is beautifully unique.

Social dictates from government and media strongly influence what we believe we should eat. There are many things we’ve been told to eat or not to eat that scientific studies later reveal to be based on false evidence. In the 1930’s through 1980’s, for instance, people were encouraged to eat margarine and were told that butter was bad for us. It turns out that margarine is not good for us (some types are now known to be harmful) and good old fashioned butter (organic please) is an excellent food source.

It’s also useful to consider the money to be made from a food product. The more processed the food, the less the nutritional value but the more profit can be made from it. Since profit dictates a lot of what gets promoted, we are strongly encouraged in the media to buy the most highly processed foods.

The ‘Nourishing Traditions’ movement came out of research of Weston A. Price in the 1930’s. Price was a dentist who, after seeing declining oral health in his patients, decided to find out what healthy people ate. He travelled around the world to find people who still ate the traditional diet unique to their area. He found that the people who ate what their ancestors had eaten for generations had beautiful healthy teeth and gums and correspondingly robust health. No matter what part of the world they lived in, all these healthy culture’s diets included high quantities of organic unprocessed saturated fats like butter, coconut oil, animal fats (dairy and meat). They ate monosaturated fats like extra virgin olive oil and smaller quantities of oils derived from seeds and nuts. They ate lots of locally grown organic produce (much of it raw, soaked or fermented), meat and fish (some of it raw), broths made from slowly simmered bones, raw whole milk and cultured milk products, and fermented foods and beverages.

For more information you can check out the non-profit foundatio
Weston A. Price Foundation. Other authors on these topics include Sally Fallon, Mary Egin, William Wolcott, A

Louise Gittleman.

You might also want to try the free ‘nutritional typing’ test and online book available at Dr. Mercola's website to help you consider what foods are best for your nutritional type.