Welcome to a new episode of The Diet of Common Sense Podcast!
The Diet of Common Sense is a common sense approach for active people to stay healthy, improve energy and mental power! It’s the nutrition of entrepreneurs, busy professionals and other active people who lack time, but value their health and well-being.
Here’s the place where nutrition and research meet common sense.
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In this podcast episode, we’ll Look at Food and Nutrition through the Doctors’ Lenses and answer questions such as:
- What is nutrition? What is the right kind of food to eat to get the best possible health?
- What is the diet for human beings?
- What is the healthiest diet and what do different healthy diets have in common?
and more questions answered.
Listen to the full podcast episode or read the transcript below:
“Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food.” This famous quote is attributed to Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine” in ancient Greece. It recognizes the value of healthy eating to overall health and well-being, as well as the therapeutic role of certain foods. Hippocrates based his medical practice on observations and on the study of the human body.
Now more evidence shows that whole food plant-based diets play an important role in our health and well-being. Research also shows that 50-80% of chronic diseases are partly related to or affected by nutrition.
Still, why is nowadays the science of nutrition so little considered in medicine, with the result that we have so many sick people? Why are doctors so bad at helping their patients make better food choices?
Most doctors agree that good nutrition is an important part of leading a healthy lifestyle.
But doctors who eat well tend to give better nutritional advice and have healthier patients, based on their own experience.
Looking at food and nutrition through the doctors’ lenses, I selected 3 TED Talks from 3 doctors who promote food for healthy living.
We’ll answer questions such as:
What is nutrition? What is the right kind of food to eat to get the best possible health?
What is the diet for human beings?
What is the healthiest diet and what do different healthy diets have in common?
and more questions answered.
Let’s start with this talk where Professor Campbell, a well-established researcher, answer the question:
1. Why is the Science of Nutrition Ignored in Medicine?
Why is the science of nutrition ignored in medicine, despite being healthy is fundamental to our lives? In this TED Talk, Professor Campbell, a well-established researcher, aims to answer this question. His most popular work The China Study – The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health has been sold in over 2 million copies and has been translated into more than 50 languages.
During his career of over 60 years, Professor Campbell has conducted experimental research on the effect of food and nutrition on the development of cancer and related chronic conditions. The China Study is the longest and most comprehensive study on how food influences the development of chronic conditions. In this book, Professor Campbell opened the eyes of a large audience with his experiments and findings. In particular, the dangers of a diet high in animal proteins and the health benefits of a plant-based diet.
The highlights from this video:
„What is nutrition? What is the right kind of food to eat to get the best possible health? Nutrition, when done right, can create more health than all the pills and procedures combined.”, says Professor Campbell. The problem for doctors is that nutrition is not taught in medical schools. And for the average person, it is very difficult to know which health claims are valid. Especially when we talk about clinical studies that isolate compounds that target the complex mechanisms of the human body.
Professor Campbell points out 2 fundamental ideas to stick to:
• Eat whole foods, not individual nutrients or food fragments of them. On a plant-based diet, variety is key.
• Plants provide all the protein needed for optimum health – there’s no animal protein needed. We don’t need to eat animal protein, plant proteins are all the protein we need to have.
These 2 ideas alone can make a significant impact on our health and well-being.
We need to consider the nutrition complexity and the fact that there’s a complex journey of nutrients through the body. Nutrients from foods, unlike supplements, don’t work individually, but together, to create powerful mechanisms. Nutrients are more powerful within whole food context, and nutrients from foods are more powerful than isolated chemicals (supplements). Which does not mean that supplements don’t have their role, especially when higher doses of one specific compound are needed. Or when there are substances that the body lacks, especially after a certain age – such as vitamin B12, vitamin D, iron and others.
Nutrition control genes via a multitude of still unknown mechanisms. Professor Campbell’s research shows that up to 10% animal protein is tolerable to keep a variety of chronic conditions in check. According to Professor Campbell, „whole food nutrition prevents, treats and cures a wide range of disease and illness. Benefits of whole plant food begins within days to weeks and continues for a lifetime.”
And still, despite increasing evidence on the positive correlation between health and nutrition, why is nutrition not taken serious even in the medical field? „Medicine” is reductionist, dependent on targeted drug therapy – which means that after a disease is installed, we need higher amounts of certain ingredients (drugs). That’s what the clinical studies teach us. This means looking at one thing at a time versus the multitude of mechanisms in the complex human body. Another problem is that there’s too much corporate interference in the field of nutrition. There are financial interests in every field and nutrition makes no exception.
For more insights about the relationship between food and nutrition, The China Study is a valuable asset for everybody who is concerned about maintaining a good health and well-being. It also explains how proper nutrition can keep in check and potentially reverse the chronic conditions caused by the modern lifestyle, such as cancer, diabetes, the Crohn disease, arthritis, heart diseases.
Listen to the full TED Talk here:
2. What is the diet for human beings?
In the TED Talk „The food we were born to eat”, doctor John McDougall proudly says „I’m the luckiest doctor in the world because my pacients get well.”
It’s all based on a very simple principle: Feed people a diet for human beings.
What is the diet for human beings?
When you look back through history, going back even 2.5 milion years, you’ll see that human beings have lived on starch-based diets. The diet for human beings has been traditionally and always will be a diet based on starch with the addition of fruits and vegetables.
How about our businesses? We are competing in a world market and our workers are fat and sick. How do we compete with people in Japan who live on a starch-based diet, or China or India?
You are going to fix dietary diseases by fixing the problem, which is the food. And when you fix the food, what happens is people get healthy. You as individuals, sick with various diseases, communities, countries, the world can get healthy by making simple changes.
What can you eat? A few ideas: oatmeal for breakfast, hash brown potatoes, for lunch bean soup, pea soup, lentil soup; for dinner bean burritos, pasta with marinara sauce, mu-shu vegetables and rice.
Listen to the full TED Talk here:
3. What is the healthiest diet and what do different healthy diets have in common?
Eat for real change | with Dr Joanna McMillan | TEDxMacquarieUniversity
We know that diet and lifestyle, mostly diet is intricately involved in all of those chronic diseases. If we were to change the way that we eat, we could dramatically reduce those numbers; we could dramatically reduce the early death that is in the country and dramatically improve the quality of life for so many people. But why is it that it’s so hard to do?
It’s really hard to change the way that we do and part of that is because of how ingrained the way that we eat is in the way that we live today.
But I also feel that part of the problem is the amount of confusion. I was involved in a recent study where we asked people how they felt about healthy eating whether they were confused by it. 87% of people said that they were completely confused by what on earth is healthy eating.
The Mediterranean diet which is actually pretty high in fat, but fat from really good stuff, like extra virgin olive oil, avocado, nuts and seeds. Really solid evidence behind that kind of a diet.
The Japanese diet: the Okinawans have more people that live to a hundred than anyone else in the world. So that diet has been studied extensively to see what can we learn from it.
But when we look at those different approaches, they have some commonalities, and that is they’re based on real food, on whole foods.
Nutrition as a science – we have so much more to understand and to know, so it’s a fascinating science to get into, to study and read about. But there’s so much we need to know. But there are, despite the apparent confusion, there are some very clear messages coming out of this science, that is there are some foundations we can all employ, and the most important one of those is that about eating more plants. We absolutely must eat more plant food. That’s the first thing.
Listen to the full TED Talk here:
As a conclusion:
What do these talks have in common? Is there an underlying pattern of healthy eating? What are the commonalities of different diets and complicated nutrition schemes?
Yes, it seems that going back to Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine” in ancient Greece, to nowadays modern Western diets, the ones that promote the most health benefits are the ones based on plants. The diet for human beings was traditionally and always will be a diet based on real food, on whole foods.
Research and time has proven that diet and lifestyle, mostly diet is involved in all of those chronic diseases. To be more precise, today about 50-80% of chronic diseases are partly related to or affected by nutrition. Are these numbers an involution rather than an evolution when it comes to our most precious assett: our health? How comes that after almost 2500 years, are we still behind to figuring out the right path to optimal health and wellbeing? Or at least apparently.
What stands in the way of achieving better results? Of more people being healthy and happy?
It appears there are 2 underlying problems:
– We are products of habit, and bad habits are especially hard to break. Part of that is because of how ingrained the way that we eat is in the way that we live today. Faced with the complexity of modern life, bad habits are even more difficult to break.
– The other part of the problem is the amount of confusion, both between doctors and normal people. 87% of people said that they were completely confused by what on earth is healthy eating. This is not quite right.
But still, the message is simple, although it appears reductionist: eat more food good for your health. Eat more plants and diversify. Start living with real food! This is the main idea.
Or “Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food.”, according to Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine” in ancient Greece. Almost 2500 years later, the principle is the same.
Check my FREE Food Recipe E-Book for Busy People: 30 Recipes To Kick Start and Encourage Your Healthy Eating Habits for Life. You can download it for free here.
Also, remember to check the original TED Talks for the real listening experience and more insight into this matter.
That’s all for this episode!
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To your health and success,
Sarah