Years ago, the article Can We Say What Diet is Best for Health?, by David Katz and Stephanie Meller from Yale University School of Public Health, was published in the Annual Review of Public Health. A related essay by James Hamblin, Science Compared Every Diet, and the Winner is Real Food, was subsequently published in the Atlantic.  

Katz and Meller compared low-carb, low-fat, low-glycemic, Mediterranean, DASH, Paleolithic, and vegan diets, concluding that “A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention.”  Michael Pollan said, “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” More recent research continues to confirm these findings.

Choosing primarily intact carbs, nourishing fats, and high-quality protein has a dramatic effect on your health such that any hint of a double chin begins to shrink away almost immediately, your skin begins to shine in just days, your pants fit better within two weeks, and your energy improves in weeks to months. Also, your risk of heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, and many cancers falls up to eighty percent (not a typo). When you focus on real food, nutrients tend to take care of themselves.

Here are some helpful definitions: 

1) Intact carbs are vegetables, beans, fruits and whole grains with a fiber matrix. Carbs without fiber are stripped carbs, examples of which include white flour, corn starch, corn syrup, white rice, and sugar. It is not a coincidence that white flour looks exactly like corn starch and powdered sugar. Once the original identity of a food has been stripped away, all that’s left is a pile of white powder. Limit your intake of stripped carbs. The glycemic index becomes a non-issue when you avoid stripped carbs. 

2) Nourishing fats include avocados, olives, olive oil, nuts, seeds, dark chocolate, and deep-sea fatty fish. There are more, but these are some that most of us can agree on. Avoid the ultraprocessed fats invented in the 20th century, and don’t buy anything with the word “hydrogenated” in the ingredient list. Vote with your wallet.

3) High-quality protein sources include beans, lentils, chickpeas, tofu, peas, pulses, legumes. Peanuts are a bean, too. Many cultures consider beans magic, perhaps because they have the rare quality of being rich in both protein and fiber at the same time. High-quality protein is also found in fish, poultry, eggs, dairy, and certain meats, as long as they themselves were raised on nourishing diets, like grass (e.g., cows, steer, game, lamb), phytoplankton (e.g., fish), or bugs and worms (e.g., poultry), food sources that have been a significant part of their diet for thousands of years. If, on the other hand, they are fed highly processed, industrially-based protein sources of lesser quality, these low-quality items are simply concentrated up the food chain. As my father said time and again, “You are what you eat.”

David Katz said that “…With [the] knowledge already at our disposal, we could eliminate eighty percent of chronic disease…” “…We’re paying for ignorance with human lives…”