How do you define an optimal diet? A diet that increases
well-being and longevity. Are there objectively measureable nutrients which you
should look out for? Calories, Micro-nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants etc. are
all things we can measure today in a food. But there are big differences
between what we can measure in the lab and what ultimately happens in the human
body.
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| Dark and intense colors are an indicator of antioxidants |
I recommend to trust our senses in choosing between different options of natural food sources. It is best to go for the vegetables with the brightest and most intense colors, the most complex flavors and the greatest aromas. Going this route will lead us away from animal foods and towards a variety of wild plant foods. Wild edible greens, flowers, fruits and berries provide the greatest amount of beneficial micronutrients. Our domesticated vegetables on the other hand maximize calories and weight over flavor and nutrition. Because that is what you usually pay for at the grocery store.
So the best solution would be in my opinion to collect most
of your green vegetables and salads directly in nature and add in more
calorically dense foods like nuts, seeds and root vegetables from the store.
Get yourself a comprehensive guidebook which you can take with you when you go
out collecting edible plants. I can recommend this one in german language.
One of my favorite
meals is the following green super-food smoothie:
- Wild edible greens 100-300g
- Frozen spinach 100gr
- Spirulina 10gr
- Wheatgrass powder 10gr
- Cacao powder 5gr
- Flaxseeds 10gr
- Nuts or seeds 20gr
- Banana 100gr
- Dates 15gr
- Stevia 1 tablet or drop
- Lemon (with peel!) 1 slice
- Ginger 10gr
- Beet juice 100ml
I recommend blending the greens first, with as little water
as possible. Later add the powders, flaxseeds and fruits and blend a second
time. (In a high speed blend I blend for 30 seconds twice.) That way you are
not left with any big chunks of the tougher leaves.
In this way you will maximize your nutrition while reducing
your grocery bill. Because if you wanted to buy the same amount of nutrition
from the store you would have to buy much larger quantities of the vegetables
that usually sells there. But you can also find exceptions like kale, red
cabbage, some broccoli-types and spinach.
You can also start to grow your own highly flavorful
vegetables. Try out some different herbs in the smoothies or salads and you
will discover that they greatly increase the variety of flavors.
If you want dive deeper into the topic of optimal nutrition
for longevity, I recommend the book “How not to die”. There you will find the
scientific background on which to decide what food are healthy and nutritious
and which are not. I would like to point out though that these studies usually
focused on foods that are available at grocery stores. So you will not find
many nutritional studies on wild edible plants in that book as well. But I
guess it is save to estimate that many wild plants have similar nutritional
density to the commonly consumed herbs like rosemary, oregano, marjoram,
peppermint or berries like goji, acai and amla. As these foods have the highest
concentration of antioxidants, we can assume that highly flavorful wild plants
have similar properties.
Why strive for such a diet?
Increasing the nutritional density of your diet will make you feel energized and all around better. Your mental and physical capabilities are certain to increase. As a reader of this blog I guess you are interested in achieving higher spiritual and personal goals, you are generally interested in learning and improving your life. This is a great challenge besides the daily hassles and duties you likely have to fulfill. Therefore it is wise to fuel your mind and body only with the greatest fuel available.
Increasing the nutritional density of your diet will make you feel energized and all around better. Your mental and physical capabilities are certain to increase. As a reader of this blog I guess you are interested in achieving higher spiritual and personal goals, you are generally interested in learning and improving your life. This is a great challenge besides the daily hassles and duties you likely have to fulfill. Therefore it is wise to fuel your mind and body only with the greatest fuel available.
Only then can you truly maximize your potential. You will
feel the effects on your mood - you are able to treat the people around you in
a nicer, calmer and more understanding way. That’s when you can really
appreciate and see the effects of a highly nutritious diet. You can design a
diet that is so off the chart amazing and nutritious that you will feel so
alive it is incomparable to any standard modern diet. Once you have experienced
the effects of such excellent nutrition, there will be no chance you want to go
back to eating processed food. It will instantly increase your capacity to
practice things like all day awareness, mindfulness, meditation and
concentration. Eating becomes one more aspect of your life where you act with
full presence and mindfulness. While eating the most nutritious and flavorful
foods it is impossible not so savor and mindfully appreciate every bite. Your
taste preferences will change within the first two weeks and afterwards you
will like natural levels of sweetness and bitter tastes.
Our modern health challenges show us clearly three things.
We are not adapted to calorically dense food because we can become overweight,
which has health consequences. We develop inflammatory diseases, which develop
because of a nutrient and antioxidant poor diet. And lastly we are not adapted
to properly judge our caloric requirements in a sedentary environment. We were
used to get a lot more daily exercise.
Two ratios are out of balance:
- caloric intake and caloric expenditure
- micro-nutrient intake to micro-nutrient requirement
What role do animal product play in a diet focused on high nutrient density
The most basic problem with animal products in that scenario
is the relatively low concentration of secondary micro-nutrients and especially
antioxidants in combination with a high concentration of calories and protein.
Those circumstances make it really difficult to argue for the inclusion of
animal foods. To the contrary certain amino-acid (like Methionine and Leucine)
and fatty acids and cholesterol are likely to have negative health
implications. The opinions, whether such nutrients are good or bad for our
health, diverge. So it would be saver to eat the foods where there is no such
consensus among scientists. And those are antioxidant rich plant foods. There
is no consensus about whether such foods are healthy or not. The more
antioxidants a natural food contains the better it is for our health in
general. This goes even so far that a variety of plant foods are so rich in
antioxidants that they have historically been used as medicine. An example is
the indian gooseberry called amla. It is most antioxidant rich plant food
discovered so far and has a long history of medicinal use for a great variety
of ailments.
Animal foods can certainly have a place in a healthy diet.
But in a very limited quantity and they must come from the cleanest sources.
Because toxins accumulate upwards throughout the food-chain.