How To Be Well: Food
The next few blog posts are going to cover the most important pillars for wellness. And in my opinion, this first one that we're going to cover is the end all, be all, if you want to be well. If you make one switch to have a healthier life, this is the switch that I recommend. I feel that it is the most powerful way to introduce wellness into your life.
That pillar is food. Everything you put in your mouth can fuel your body or cause harm. We require food. You need it to live. And if you make one positive change in your life towards a healthier, more well-balanced life, that would be changing it up with your food.
Now, I have a recommendation that I give many people; many of my patients ask me of all the changes I should make, what's the most effective one? My answer: Only shop the perimeter of the grocery store.
I recommend you avoid the center aisles that have all of the processed and packaged foods. So, sticking to the perimeter is going to allow you access to your fruits and veggies, your dairy items, and we will talk about that in a minute (why you may or may not want to avoid dairy). Also, eggs and then meats if you so choose to eat them. I want you to stick to the perimeter of the store because everything that's in those center aisles is chock full of tons of things that can cause inflammation in your body. It can lead to digestive disorders, it can lead to mental health disorders; if you have too much inflammation, we know that there's a strong gut brain connection. And if you inflame your gut, you are eventually going to inflame your brain. And that could lead to things like brain fog, easy forgetfulness, and ultimately at some point it could lead to dementia. Alzheimer's, in fact, has actually been called a type three diabetes (we will touch on that in a future blog post). If you want to avoid having gut issues, skin issues, brain health issues, and a whole host of other things, I think the easiest thing that you can do is to change up your food and just shop from the perimeter.
So of course, and I think every doctor out there will say this, load up your plate with fruits and veggies. Now there's going to be an asterisk on this because not all bodies do well with certain fruits or certain veggies. We will get into more details about antihistamine diets, people with food sensitivities or allergies and things that we've been taught are “healthy” but may not be healthy for you as an individual in future posts. So, if you have questions about this, I would love for you to reach out to me and we can take a deep dive into exactly what foods are perfect for your body.
Sticking to the perimeter of the grocery store means that when you load up your plate for lunch, dinner, breakfast, whatever the meal is, I want half of that plate to be fruits/veggies, and healthy fats like avocados, which is also a fruit. And then you can load up the rest with healthy proteins, and that could be anything from animal meats to eggs and possibly dairy if your digestion allows.
Let's go down this dairy road a little bit: dairy in the way that we know it today in the United States can be extremely inflammatory. And I do recommend for most people that they do NOT consume dairy at all. But definitely not on a regular basis. The dairy industry in the United States has a lot of problems in my opinion, and they're not always looking out for the health of the consumer. They're trying to earn a living at running their dairy farm. And so oftentimes dairy can have a lot of inflammatory substances in it. And I know if you grew up in the eighties and the nineties, like me, and you were trained, that the only way to get calcium and have strong bones and teeth is to drink your milk.
Well, I will let you know that that is untrue. There have been tons of studies done over the years that show the highest dairy consuming countries on the planet actually have the highest instance of osteopenia and osteoporosis: weak bones. The United States is one of the highest consuming dairy countries in the world, and we happen to have the highest instance of osteoporosis, which basically is like porous bones. There are little holes in the bones that lead to easy breaks as we get older. We've heard this from so many people and there's a huge correlation between drinking tons of milk in the United States and having high instances of osteoporosis. And the reason for that is not the calcium, because yes, the milk in the United States does have calcium, and oftentimes it's even infused with additional calcium, but it's also so inflammatory that the inflammation requires so many white blood cells and red blood cells to go out as the immune defense for the body, which is made in the bones.
These blood cells are having to go out to combat the inflammation in the body at such high rates that the bones are becoming more porous and weak, causing more instances of osteopenia and osteoporosis. So, I do recommend that most people avoid dairy. If you have a known autoimmune condition, I 100% say that you have to be absolutely dairy free. And here's something that I've learned from a couple of professors over the years: I was always the person who'd say, well, I'm about 98% gluten-free, meaning that maybe once a month or once every other month, I'll have a piece of bread or something that has gluten in it. Well, you're either pregnant or you're not. You can't be 98% pregnant. In this case, when we're talking about dairy, if you are going to avoid dairy, if you have a known autoimmune condition and it's imperative that you avoid dairy, then you cannot be 98% dairy-free without it causing damage. You have to either be dairy-free or not dairy-free. Again, you can't be 98% pregnant. You either are, or you aren't. So, keeping that in mind, let's avoid the dairy section.
For the most part, when we're shopping around the perimeter of the grocery store for food, another great source of protein is going to be eggs. Eggs can be an excellent source of protein for people. I do recommend that when you purchase eggs, that the package say that they are “pasture raised.” Now, this is not a regulated system in the United States, unfortunately. So technically the manufacturers can put whatever they want on that package of eggs. However, if it does say pasture raised, in my experience, those companies that raise their eggs in a pasture truly do raise their hens outside who are laying eggs and are in a much more natural environment than living in giant warehouses, unable to move very much during the day.
So even the term “cage free” doesn’t necessarily mean that these are happy chickens running around outside in the sunshine all day. So do your research, find a good farming area (if you live near one), there are co-ops that you can try to find, get to know the farmers. The same thing with your meat. Get to know the people who are providing the meat to the stores around you if you have the ability and find out what their practices are. Are they humane? Do they feed the animals proper diets?
And so that leads me to the meat section. If you are going to choose to have meat in your diet, I recommend finding the closest to natural source that you can. So that means for beef, they need to be grass-fed and also what's called grass-finished, which means that they are only fed their natural diet of grass all the way up until slaughter.
Oftentimes, grass fed cows will still be fed grains towards the end of their life to help plump them up right before slaughter. So, I do highly recommend looking for grass-fed, grass-finished beef, and then heritage raised pork. Again, these pigs are living in much more natural environments. They're fed natural diets. Pigs eat just about anything, so not feeding them the grains, because a lot of times if you have a known grain issue, perhaps you have a gluten intolerance or a gluten allergy, and you eat these animals that they're fed gluten all the time, well that's what’s being absorbed into your body as well.
And then there are chickens. This is a touchy one for me because I do know how chickens in the United States are raised to no longer be chickens. They're not really chickens anymore, chickens are scrawny birds. Chickens should not have one-pound breasts as scrawny little birds. If you're buying these giant packs of chicken breasts that one breast is half a pound to a pound, that was definitely raised to no longer be a natural chicken. It was probably pumped full of hormones to make it larger. It was probably fed things that are not natural to its diet to, again, plump it up, make it larger. And so I really recommend if you are going to eat chicken, if chicken does well for your body, really look for as naturally raised chickens as you can possibly find. And honestly, the meat that you'll be getting off of the chickens is going to be very small compared to what we're used to in the industrialized meat industry.
That is my soapbox for today on food. Please, I know that these are simple switches, and they may not be easy. I really implore you to start shopping around the perimeter of the grocery store and avoid the processed foods that can be so damaging to our bodies, which we will get into in future posts.
Avoid the center aisles, shop the perimeter, feed your body with healthy, wonderful foods. Fuel your body with these incredible foods that grow out of the ground and be well.