Nutrition Heretic

Moderation is a term that is often bandied about by people when they no longer understand what to eat. Unfortunately, this approach to eating fails nearly 100% of the time.

My grandfather was the first person I had ever hear use the saying. He was born in the West Indies in the late 1800s. To him moderation meant eating his meals made from whole ingredients such as meat (including seafood and chicken), vegetables, bread, rice, fruit, dairy and tea. Snacks, desserts and alcohol were occasional indulgences mainly reserved for birthday parties, weddings and holidays.

To him, moderation also meant living moderately. He didn’t perform any extreme sports or go to the gym. He took walks when he needed to get somewhere. He didn’t smoke, but was not paranoid to be in the company of someone who was. He took life in stride, was never sick a day in his life and lived to be 103.

The next person to give me the moderation speech was 37 years old. She was 60 lbs overweight, avoided red meat, ate cup of soups and other processed foods for most of her meals, snacked throughout the days on various confections and ate a half dozen Dunkin Donuts and large coffee with extra low fat milk and several packets of sugar every morning for breakfast. She was a runner and contracted every disease and illness that circulated. Unfortunately, this is how the vast majority of people interpret “everything in moderation.”

The reason why some people feel this is living moderately is because they are so confused by the messages we receive from the media. We are continually told that meat and fat are bad. Then the same “nutritional experts” find every excuse possible to let us know that we need to include chocolate, coffee, red wine and processed soy foods into our diets. They claim that the only reason our ancestors thrived on high quality protein such as meat and saturated fats is because they were constantly on the move. Yet there is so much missing from this misguided information!

True, few of our ancestors sat behind a desk, but relatively few of them performed intense physical activity all day long either. Energy was often expended in short spurts followed by long periods of down time spent communing with others. Today, however, the “moderationists” feel that we can somehow exercise all the nutrients that are missing from our diets into our bodies. This is impossible. Only foods that have co-existed with humans since the dawn of our species can do this. There is no factory, no exercise, no substitute to match nature’s elements.

So if you want to live in moderation to protect your health, eat like our ancestors. They had the blueprint for good health. True there were famines and other scourges that often took them in the prime of life, but those who escaped such an end routinely lived to be 90 years and older. They did not succumb to cancer, heart disease or complications of diabetes.

To this satisfying diet, add your exercise, your spirituality, and other components of a healthy lifestyle. It is proven that all of these elements go hand in hand, but it is difficult to have the lifestyle when the diet is not congruent.

There are far more elements to consider to determining exactly how to proceed with a healthy diet. They will be gradually revealed to you as you browse the pages of this site.