A basic guide to healthy eating
by Alan Muskat
May 12th, 2009

If you're a typical American, odds are that you will die of either cancer, diabetes, or heart disease. These top three "industrial diseases" are virtually unknown in traditional societies, where people live just as long or longer– and happier too. Seniors in these cultures often die not as senile invalids but with their brains and bodies intact. Clearly we're doing something wrong. What is it?

Unfortunately, it's a lot. If you want to live a healthy life, you will almost certainly have to make some major lifestyle changes. This is not only daunting; it can be downright aggravating. It has been frustrating for me to learn, for instance, that being vegetarian and especially vegan is actually bad for you and the planet, that eating whole foods is not enough, that eating organic is not enough, that eating low-carb is not enough. How does it feel to learn that those supplements you've been taking religiously for years (like multivitamins or omega-3s) are actually bad for you, or that you gave up meat, ate a low-fat diet, or avoided the sun for years, only to learn that you're doing yourself harm by doing so?

Striving to live right means admitting you've been wrong, over and over again. Sometimes it seems like everything I've ever learned has been wrong. What's next? Is all this effort, failure, and frustration really worth it?

We all know some very happy people who don't give any thought to their diet. Some would literally rather die than give up certain pleasures. That's fine: nobody's perfect and nothing lasts forever. In fact, trying to live healthy may be precisely what we should not do. Let me explain.

What if 90% of what you are eating right now, even if you think you are eating healthy, is actually junk your body has to work to get rid of? And you've been doing this, along with other unhealthy things (like drinking and/or bathing in chlorinated water) all your life? Do you really think you can recover?

A depressing thought, isn't it. What if most people on the planet have been living this way since civilization (i.e., agriculture) began?

If our diet, our lifestyle, our civilized world is that fundamentally wrong (i.e., unnatural, and by that I mean 'not what our bodies are designed for'), then we've got an awful lot of turning around to do. And I don't think any of us can do it in one lifetime, much less on our own. None of us can escape pollution, for instance; it's everywhere. Most of the problems that manifest as individual health concerns are social and environmental and will take several generations to solve. In fact, it's the "save yourself" approach that got us and keeps us in this situation to begin with.

There is an Aesop fable about two flocks of geese. A hunter casts a net over one. The geese try to scatter, only getting each other more caught in the net. The hunter casts his net over another flock. They fly off together, in the same direction, to a pond where they all dive free of the net.

A culture of human selfishness, of caring only about ourselves and thinking we each know what is best, is what got us here. That attitude can only end, very soon, in self-destruction. Imagine a society that builds a plane that crashes in a remote corner of the world. It takes a plane to get home again. If the survivors each try to make it home on their own, do they have any chance?

Have you ever inadvertently carried an ant far from its colony? Not only does it have nothing to live for; it cannot survive. Each of us, in this divide-and-conquer capitalist society, who have no more than a nuclear family and one or two real friends, is like that ant.

Whew. That's probably a lot more than you expected, but when you decide to clean house, it can be surprising how much has been swept under the rug. To sum things up, what I'm saying– mostly to myself– is that maybe I need to accept and grieve the fact that I am screwed. But maybe the world, if I can care about that instead, is not.

With all this in mind (which I'll come back to again), here are the things I've learned– and not yet unlearned– in the past twenty years of dietary searching. I should tell you that I have no degrees or certification in the health field, and you'll see that I provide few references. For more info, I recommend Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and The Weston A. Price Foundation. Their basic "Dietary Guidelines" are very similar to mine (but much more well-informed).

More importantly, I recommend that you do not rely solely on books and your own research. If I have not made it abundantly clear, DIY is very DUM. We are all stuck in a hole, and we need others to help pull us out. So get help. Don't start changing your life without working with a holistic health professional such as an experienced clinical herbalist. You could do more harm than good.

1. Eat only natural, whole foods.

Avoid anything with over ten ingredients or more than ten letters in the name of any one ingredient.

Avoid anything invented in the last fifty years, including all fake butters and sugars regardless of what they say. Just because something says "no trans fat" or "sugar-free" does not mean it's good for you. It probably means the opposite.

On that note, especially avoid anything with "smart," "healthy," "nutritional," etc. in the name, as in so-called "nutritional yeast." Good things don't need to advertise.

Avoid any cookware and storage containers made of materials less than fifty years old, including nonstick pans, new plastic storage wrap, etc. (For which plastics are safest, see "A brief study of plastic food containers" on my website.)

2. Eat only organic food.

Organic food may cost double, but you'll save that much in doctor's bills in the long run. In other words, you can either spend your money on good food or spend it on so-called "health insurance." It's your choice.

The more popular organic food gets, the more meaningless the label becomes. To get real organic food, buy from local small producers. Even if uncertified, these can be trusted far more than large producers in California or outside the U.S. For more info, see The Revolution will Not Be Microwaved by Sandor Katz.

3. Eat fat, not carbs.

Eat as much healthy fats as you want (e.g. organic butter, coconut oil, and palm oil) while radically reducing your carb consumption, including so-called "complex" carbohydrates, i.e., whole foods that are starchy nonetheless (fruit is fine). This can be hard to do; see "Why You Must Find Some Low Carb Friends" about how social influences and our instinctive programming can make a low-carb diet difficult.

4. Eat out as little as possible.

What's the point of eating healthy at home when you're eating at restaurants? Even the best restaurants use mostly or entirely non-organic, mass-produced ingredients. So-called "health food" restaurants often rely on soy, which is very unhealthy (except when fermented as tempeh or miso). I'm sure there is a restaurant somewhere out there that serves healthy food as I define it, but I'm not aware of it.

I know that if these guidelines are new to you, you are probably already in despair. Yet this is just the beginning. Remember that you cannot change your health without changing your life.

On the other hand, don't put yourself in diet prison. If you don't enjoy it, you're just going to end up downing doughnuts or ice cream to make up for punishing yourself. It is possible to make healthy versions of these foods at home with friends and enjoy them in moderation. After all, the ban on fat (healthy fats) is lifted! And the healthier you eat and feel, the less you will crave junk food. At this point, I eat most meals without grain or anything starchy. And though it's hard for even I to believe, I don't miss it.

5. Soak all seeds overnight before use.

That includes nuts, grains, beans and flours. If, like me, when you eat pancakes for breakfast, you feel heavy, weighted down, try the soaked-flour recipe in Nourishing Traditions. Hopefully, like me, you'll feel the difference!

6. Eat plenty of antioxidant foods.

You can look up what these are on the net: basically fruits and vegetables with rich color! One reason these are important is because most of us eat overcooked food. Except for saturated fats, all foods heated above 320º denature, becoming carcinogenic. That means you do not want to fry with polyunsaturates like canola oil. But that also includes carmelizing sugar, browning meats, broiling fish, even baking bread. Sorry! Note that the inside of cooked foods usually don't reach this temperature, just the tasty part!

Fortunately, eating antioxidant foods may sufficiently prevent the damage overcooking can do. Of course you can avoid browning your food in the first place, but some things are worth dying a little sooner for.

7. Eat raw foods as much as possible, especially dairy and meat.

We fear germs like we fear terrorists, but the idea that raw meat and dairy are dangerous is a commercially-promulgated myth. It is pasteurization that is unhealthy and only necessary on factory farms. This high-tech sounding process simply means cooking food– specifically, heating it to 161 degrees for 20 seconds. Actually, you only have to heat food to about 115 degrees to cook it, for this is the temperature at which enzymes are destroyed. Without enzymes, bacteria and everything else dies. Sooner or later, so do we. That's why right around 115º is the temperature at which things will feel too hot to touch. Try it!

Raw meat is a lot harder for most of us to consider eating than raw dairy or fish, but I encourage you to look into it. On raw egg safety, see this article on Mercola.com.

Irradiation is a more recent method of sterilization. But just as with irradiation for cancer and antibiotics for infection, you can't just nuke the enemy without taking a good chunk of your own body and its healthy resident allies down with it. Strengthen your internal community instead. Here's how:

8. Eat fermented foods.

Fermentation is exactly how your gut digests things. So fermented food is simply predigested food. That may sound icky but it's good for you. Raw fermented foods also serve as natural probiotics, just like acidophilus (which in supplements is often ineffective). For more info, see Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz.

9. Eat a variety of foods, especially wild foods, especially greens.

Grains are a modern convenience food of civilization. They have played a tremendous role in history, not because they are suitable as staples, but because they are cheap. They are cheap because they store well. And they store well because of natural preservatives which can make digesting them very difficult.

The power of agriculture is that it supports a larger population, not a healthier one. An agricultural population is not a healthier one because our bodies are not civilized.

They don't evolve in a mere few thousand years to eat what you can buy in the store. We are designed to eat what we now call "wild food," that is, natural food, not cultivated food. That's why even the earliest civilizations had heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity– simply because they relied on agriculture, especially grains. ¹ We may not even be adapted to eating cooked food!

Cooking aside, even if you avoid a diet heavy in grains (particularly white flour), you're still not going to get the nutrition you're designed for. That's because cultivated plant and animal products have far less nutritional value than their wild precursors. Wild food will be more nutritious because it is healthier itself. Plants and animals growing in the wild, where and when they grow naturally, are going to be healthier. They need to be, otherwise they wouldn't survive. Who do you think is going to be healthier, Tarzan or an accountant? If I were a cannibal, I think I know who would be more nutritious!

But the truth is simpler than that. Like I started out by saying, what's good for us is simply what we've evolved to eat. If cotton candy grew on trees, we might just as well have evolved to eat that. We're adapted to eating what's mostly available in nature. And in most places and times, that's wild greens. That's why grass-fed meat and dairy is better for you. Granted, a strict "paleolithic diet" would exclude dairy products given that animal domestication is no older than agriculture. But then it should also exclude olive oil, beer, bananas, chocolate… not to mention cars, telephones, electricity, iron and steel… (for more info see here). In other words, hopefully the argument is sound even when we make exceptions. Good books on wild foods include The Forager's Harvest by Sam Thayer and The Neighborhood Forager by Robert Henderson.

Finally, for all our apparent choice in the supermarket, people today eat only a fraction of the variety of foods we ate only a hundred years ago. How many of us eat celery root, seaweed, sunchokes, or kidneys? You've heard about eating refined foods, but we eat refined diets.

Some of us try to fill in the nutrients we end up missing with supplements. Sometimes these are even mixed into our food, like iodine in salt or vitamins in cereal. But these are cheap and often ineffective substitutes. Ascorbic acid, for instance, is only one of hundreds of components that actually make up "vitamin C." Sure, it's the main component, but taking ascorbic acid for vitamin C is like putting an engine in a car frame and expecting the car to run. Eating just a few cultivated foods and making sure you get enough protein, fat, and the basic vitamins is pretty much the same thing.

The fact is, you can't fix the body with supplements any more than you can fix a computer with a wrench: it's just too complex. You can try playing the sorcerer's apprentice, but to think we can engineer health with exotic or scientific magic bullets, even "functional foods," is egotistical and naïve.²

Living well is not about "doing what you need to do" to stay healthy. It's about doing and eating what comes naturally, without effort or new years resolutions. I'm talking about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. People assume hunting and gathering takes a lot of work. Try farming! Benjamin Franklin said "no European who has tasted savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies." Listen to the song, "Night Rider's Lament." Granted, the Iroquois who Franklin was probably talking about were hunter-farmers, and cowboys generally don't grub around for their vittles. But it's quite possible that hunter-gatherers work far less than civilized people. Some call them the "original affluent society." For a powerful critique of the myth of agriculture as progress, read The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith.

10. Get enough exercise, laughs, and love.

It's easy to focus on food, but just as only a small part of who we are is physical, food is at best only ¼ of the picture. Changing how you live is far more important. And that's a lot harder than just changing where you shop or what you buy. "Going green" is not going to save you or the world.

Like I said earlier, we live in a fragmented society: most of us lack real community. "To love and be loved," like all the best things in life, may be free, but free does not always mean easy. Good relationships are not easy. You can't just buy them. For resources on improving your relationships, physical and otherwise, visit the The REAL Center.

Poor relationships (such as hating our parents and everyone who reminds us of them) cause much of the stress in our lives. And in my estimation, unnecessary stress is the #1 cause of premature death and aging. It's also much of the reason we eat poorly in the first place. People like me may obsess about diet to avoid deeper emotional issues. There's even a medical diagnosis for obsessing about food; it's called orthorexia. For more info, see When Food is Love by Geneen Roth.

The longest-living man in history (not counting biblical personages like Moses and Enoch) was an English peasant who worked in the fields until his death at the age of 152. According to William Harvey, the famous physician, "Old Par" lived "on subrancid cheese and milk in every form, coarse and hard bread and small drink, generally sour whey. On this sorry fare, but living in his home, free from care, did this poor man attain to such length of days.".³ Old Par was stress-free.

Until the year she died, my old neighbor, Mrs. Brown, also lived alone– on frozen pizza, ham, corn and Bright and Early orange juice. She used to sweep the street because, as she put it, "it do me good to stir." She was also fond of saying, with a shiver that overtook her, "I LOVES my Jesus." She lived to 102.

I'm not saying you have to live alone or love Jesus, but I do think that the foundation of health is a strong faith. What that means for me is believing in life. If you are stressed out, maybe you need to ask yourself the question, "do I believe in life? Do I believe that everything is going to be all right, that everything is for the best?"

At 42, you wouldn't consider Maureen McCarthy old– unless you knew that she is supposed to be dead. Maureen has LAM, a rare and progressive lung disease, and at this point she has less than 10% lung capacity. You wouldn't know it though, because aside from wearing a breathing tube some of the time, Maureen appears normal. Better than normal, actually. A corporate consultant and frequent keynote speaker, Maureen is more vibrant than most people I know.

What is Maureen's secret? Faced ten years ago with her prognosis, Maureen decided that she didn't have the time or energy to get upset about everything– or anything. She decided that she just could not afford to let things bother her. For Maureen, each day was and is a gift. As she puts it, "I love what is."

That's what I mean by believing in life. Loving what is. The word "health" literally means wholeness, and you get whole when you not only accept but love life as a whole– all of it.

This is not just some selfish new age magic trick. It's a spiritual approach to life, to be sure, but a religious one. The word religion actually means "to bring back together." If you love all of life, it means you love others as well and want what's best for them too. In other words, you can love what's wrong and still work to change it. Conversely, don't have to hate what's wrong in order to work for what's right. On the contrary, as Thaddeus Golas paradoxically explains in The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, only when you love something can you leave it.

11. Use drugs only sparingly.

Drugs are refinements on life. They include things we put into our mouths like white sugar, white flour, and white salt, but also things we take in our eyes and ears, like the media– white people or otherwise: television, movies, radio, magazines and books. These are all refinements on life because they are life mediated, i.e., parts of it selected and packaged.

Computers are a drug. Music is a drug. All art, in fact, being a refinement, a special arrangement or representation of life, is a drug: often an idealization, but always a simplification, if only in being static or a given perspective. Ideas (i.e., concepts) are all drugs because they are generalizations, i.e., simplifications, refinements on life. Ideas are intoxicating; they can also be toxic.

In our materialistic society, we may not recognize all these "immaterial" things as drugs, but they release drugs inside ourselves nonetheless, like adrenalin. Their exciting or calming effects feel good for a while. But the ancient taoists warned against them (see Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters by A.C. Graham).

The problem with these refinements is that real life is infinitely complex. Since we experience it in time, you can also say that life is always changing. Whenever you restrict your diet, however, whether of food, ideas, or experiences, you're selecting from it, so life becomes less diverse, more generic, more of the same. The less you do this, the more specific your experience, and you become more present and more whole, i.e., healthier.

Sound familiar? This is just the old 'zen' idea of having an empty mind so you can fully experience and respond to each new moment. Samurai need it; we can get by for long stretches without it, but then we are living asleep, dreaming.

Of course it's OK to dream. I even think that all of life is a dream. But life is the ultimate dream. If you are not participating in it, you are probably retreating from it. Life is a challenge, for sure, and taking drugs is easy but ultimately unsatisfying. That's why drugs are addictive: they feel good for a while because they are simpler, less complicated than life: like stereotyping people, for instance, and making fun or them or killing them. But sooner or later we wake up to reality, which is that one hand is cutting the other.

Only by participating in all of life, by being present to and part of our primary relationship, our family, our job, community, country, planet, universe, everything– and everything is what I mean by "God"– can we finally be healed, healthy, and happy. That's enlightenment. That's what Hinduism calls Realization: realizing that it's all good, all God, including me and you and everything we thought was bad.

So what is right and wrong? And if nothing is fundamentally either, why do we forget this?

Although in this view, there's nothing that in general is right or wrong (those are just ideas), and although life is ultimately a dream (I'm afraid it takes a whole book to explain this, and I'm working on it now; see Part One here), we can hurt each other. However, nothing's permanent: hurt, harm, even death. That's what I mean by life being a dream. And I would even say that life is not about avoiding hurting each other. "Right" living, then, is the effort toward enlightenment, toward feeling each other's pain as much as "our" own. In other words, becoming one big Being. Then all our actions have Our self-interest in mind. Then there is no other.

When that happens, life is no longer work but play. Nothing needs to be done. Think about it: if it's all a game, if you can't die, can't lose any more than the game, then why do you have to struggle, why do you have to hurt each other to survive? This is all done in ignorance, ignorance of our true nature: our true Unity.

If we've all heard this before, that "we're all One," in church or in books, and if it's actually true, and maybe at some point we actually believed it, then why do we forget? Very simply, we forget in order to play the game. If you're going to play pin the tail on the donkey, you have to be blindfolded. We have an innate tendency toward ignorance; it's part of the game. That's why I'm not spoiling the fun by telling you this: even if you believe me, you're sure to forget!

This idea of life being a game may seem straightforward enough, but it's a quite a slap in the face to all who have lost a loved one, or parts of their own life, to some tragedy or injustice. "The Holocaust was a game?" "9-11 is a joke?" "You mean to say that rape, torture, and child abuse are just for fun?" My answer is, do you want these things to go on or not? I'm telling you that there is no other way to stop cruelty than to see it for what it is. Nothing else has worked.

Have you ever had or heard of a nightmare that goes on and on? Night after night, you are hounded by the same persecutor. You can't get away; you can't fight and win. The nightmare only ends when you turn around and face the monster and see it for what it is: a part of you, the one that is doing the dreaming! This awareness is called lucidity. Staying in this awareness, that you are the dreamer, is called lucid dreaming.

Usually the only way we manage to escape a nightmare is by crying out in despair, and our cry wakes us up. It wakes us up out of the dream to who we really are, the dreamer. Yet we look around and see others as separate from ourselves. The challenge is to realize that we too are being dreamt by something bigger than ourselves, something that contains us all. The challenge is to remain awake, aware, lucid in the dream of life.

So it goes, the game of falling asleep to separateness and waking up again to unity. That is the meaning of life. The most surprising thing about it, to me at least, is that it is so simple! Not complicated, but quite possibly the hardest thing in the world.

12. Use your intuition.

Everything I've said is just a bunch of ideas. Learn to feel what's right for you. For some people under certain circumstances, smoking is the best thing they can do (see "Bodies, Habits, Likes and Dislikes - All Karmic" in Paxton Robey's No Time for Karma, online here).

Ultimately, we don't know what's right and wrong, for us or anyone else. Only God knows. And the only way to know what God knows, moment by moment, is through your intuition.

So that's it. I'm sure there's details I left out. Like Michael Pollan so brilliantly cautions us, don't overeat. Then there's drinking and bathing in clean water, breathing clean air, and getting enough sun. Turns out that sitting in a sunny room and bathing with soap both negate the effects of sun exposure.⁴ More evidence for the depressing contention that nearly everything humanity has invented is wrong, i.e., unnatural and unhealthy. In twenty years or so, if we last that long, we will probably all agree that wireless devices like cell and portable phones, along with laptops, hair dryers, and riding in cars, all cause cancer. Even the magnetic field in your fridge may be causing dangerous changes in your food.

In the end, life is not about doing everything right. I think it's about how come to view our "mistakes." And like I said, I think being overly focused on our own individual health may be the biggest mistake of all. So lighten up: we're all gonna die!

¹ although many of the traditional diets I refer to in my opening remarks are agrarian, according to Sally Fallon they did not eat excessive amounts of grain (so as to throw their omega-6/omega-3 ratio off) and what grain they did consume was properly prepared to neutralize its natural preservatives (see Nourishing Traditions). It's also possible that new world and heirloom grains like quinoa, amaranth, and teff are lower-carb, phytate-free, and healthier in other ways than rice and wheat.

² see for example, Tara Parker-Pope, "News Keeps Getting Worse for Vitamins," NYT, 11/20/08

³ McLaughlin, A Diet of Tripe, 36.

⁴ "Sunshine Can Actually Decrease Your Vitamin D Levels," 5/12/09. Note that the title refers not to the sunlight you're exposed to outside but the partial sunlight that comes through window glass. For general sun exposure recommendations see here. Note that Dr. Mercola's contention that soap washes away vitamin D has been contested. According to Brady Hurst DC, CCCN, the vitamin D produced occurs in deeper layers of the skin that are not affected by bathing (email, 11/10/09).

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