Reverse Chronic Disease with Nutrition

When you eat healthy and whole foods, you instinctually lose your desire to overeat. Diets to lose weight almost always fail because people can’t control calorie intake because they don’t consume sufficient nutrients. When you try to diet to lose weight after consuming large amounts of sugar and ultra refined grains which are addictive, will almost always fails.

A person eating ideally to maximize optimal nutrient intake, will have a decrease in sugar cravings and will be able to control the amount of calories ingested without having to measure calories consumed. The diseases afflicting most Americans can be avoided, and lifespan enhanced and lengthened by understanding better nutrition.

A Healthy Eating Plan

A healthy eating plan will not only improve your health, but your brain power; maximizing your productivity, creativity, giving you full mental faculties right until the end of your life.

Develop a lifestyle of eating complemented with supplemental recommendations consistent with recent nutritional science, using the evidence to maximize health, and offer protection from cancer, heart disease, strokes, and dementia.

The Standard American Diet

The disease statistics of Americans are really dismal when you follow a Standard American Diet (SAD). Thirty percent of Americans die of heart attacks and strokes; about thirty percent die of cancer too. All these chronic diseases can be avoided. We don’t have to have a heart attack. You don’t have to have a stroke. We don’t have to have cancer. That’s right, we can prevent more than 90 percent of common (non-smoking related) cancers such as breast, colon, and prostate cancer. 

The SAD diet has left the US overweight, and in poor health. It has left most older Americans in pain as we age and promotes development of high blood pressure, diabetes, memory loss, and heart disease.

We can divide food into 3 categories: processed foods, animal products, and unrefined plant food or produce. Americans eat about 60 percent of their diet from processed foods and about 30% from animal products.

That means Americans eat only about 10% of calories from produce and just a few percent from whole grains. Most of those produce-derived calories come from white potatoes. The lack of natural plant foods, particularly fresh vegetables in the American diet, contributes to our country’s high rate of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

When we eat like other Americans, we don’t just experience a premature death, we also suffer for many years before dying. There’s lots of sickness, discomfort, and the use of invasive medical procedures and medical procedures before the person actually dies. This does not need to happen to you. Sickness and disability are not the normal consequence of aging. When we adopt a diet that is naturally rich in all the nutrients the human body needs for optimal health, it offers powerful disease protection.

People believe that what they eat is good enough

Lots of people want to believe that a diet that is not as healthful, is good enough; that what you choose to eat each day hardly matters, and that a diet that’s less nutritionally is just as healthy as a diet designed to be rich in nutrients. 

It can be normal to live free of chronic disease and maintain a normal weight, when you eat a diet that’s rich in all the nutrients we need. The fundamental principle is to Maximize Nutrients and then include exercise, reduction of stress, better sleep and meaningful social interactions while avoiding Harmful Substances such as chemicals.

If you eat lots of foods that are rich in nutrients per calorie and consume a diet with lots of colorful vegetables and fruit; you will be healthier. If you eat lots of foods that are low in nutrients and high in calories — junk foods, processed foods, white sugar and white flour; calorie-rich, low-nutrient foods — you shorten your life with every single bite.

Phytochemicals

When we are talking about nutrients here, I am referring to micronutrients. Micronutrients are vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and phytochemicals. They have critical functions in the body, and they do not contain calories. By the way, there are thousands of phytochemicals in colorful plant food, and they are all valuable. Our body utilizes thousands of plant-derived nutrients to achieve excellent health. It needs these thousands of nutrients.

Of course, you’ve heard about vitamins and minerals, but there are many different families of micronutrients and phytochemicals, such as carotenoids, which have potent antioxidant effects, preventing oxidative damage. And flavonoids, which enable signaling pathways within our cells. These micronutrients have many different critical functions in the body and the brain. Deficiencies or insufficiencies of micronutrients damage our health, accelerate aging, and gradually accumulate damage in the body year to year.

micronutrient insufficiencies

And micronutrient insufficiencies are present across almost all Americans. More than half of our population takes in less than the recommended amount of vitamin C, and more than 75 percent of the population consumes less than the recommended daily intake for vitamins A and E. We look at fiber, magnesium, all are way below the recommended daily intake. 

Too Much Salt

Over 90 percent of adults consume more than the upper limit of sodium, while only about 2 percent meet the recommended daily intake for potassium. Most Americans also do not consume recommended amounts of folate from food, which is about 400 micrograms, though many exceed the tolerable upper limit for synthetic folic acid from fortified foods and supplements, which most likely increases the risk of cancer. Synthetic folic acid is shown to be a cancer promoter and not the same chemical substance as real folate found in vegetables.

These broad-spectrum micronutrient insufficiencies are largely because the American diet is deficient in vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds. These insufficiencies have far-reaching consequences and lead to chronic disease, premature aging, and a premature death. 

Remember that vitamins and minerals don’t each have one job — they facilitate many different reactions throughout the body. For example, low magnesium intake, as seen in the SAD diet, is linked to increased risk for osteoporosis, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, cancer, and sudden cardiac death

There are hundreds of micronutrients that SAD eaters are low in, not just magnesium. And that’s not surprising when we look at the typical American diet and see all the diseases Americans get.

Macro vs. Micro Nutrients

Calories come from macronutrients, not micronutrients. Water is one macronutrient. The other macronutrients are the calorie-containing nutrients: fat, carbohydrate, and protein. Most people eat more calories than they need, significantly shortening their potential lifespan. In fact, most people in the modern world are consuming about twice as many calories as their body needs.

We need to eat enough to maintain a normal weight with appropriate skeletal and muscular strength while at the same time maintain a relatively low percent of body fat. With proper weight-bearing exercise to maintain appropriate musculature, we can maintain a healthy weight and still reduce caloric intake significantly.

Moderate calorie restriction while consuming a nutrient dense diet will lead to a healthier you, prevent or reverse chronic diseases. Everything you put in your mouth matters. You become what you eat.

What to do

Eat more plants and fruit, avoid red meat intake, reduce overall intake of meat to get all the nutrients your body needs. Vegetables contain the most nutrients, and animal products and processed foods contain very little. Green vegetables have the greatest nutrient density of all foods. Other colorful foods, such as tomatoes, mushrooms, eggplant, peppers, carrots are also rich in nutrients per calorie. 

That is one reason hundreds of studies show green vegetable consumption is linked to longer lifespan. As you eat more nutrient rich foods, your hunger diminishes and your appetite normalizes. What I am saying here is that it is almost impossible to succeed on a diet, lose weight and keep it off without focusing on the quality of what you are eating. 

When you eat low-nutrient foods like white bread, cookies, cold breakfast cereals, and pasta, you become a calorie-consuming monster and it becomes impossible to remain at a favorable weight. Our recommendation is to start eating a big serving of cooked green vegetables with your dinner. They can be frozen vegetables that you just defrosted. Vegetables like: frozen broccoli florets, frozen artichoke hearts, and frozen asparagus. Eat at least a cup every evening, take some raw greens and dip them into boiling water for one or two minutes to blanch them. You can flavor them with hummus or a salsa. 


Discover more from Rx Health and Wellness

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Verified by MonsterInsights