Published at http://campisechiropractorfresno.blogspot.com/ Monday, August 17, 2015
This is a rough draft of the first chapter of a new book. Please give feedback, especially any questions you’d like answered about food and general diet that aren’t covered so far here. Thanks!
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| Most can find room for a small veggie garden. |
Optimal Health Diet:
(Assuming your digestion is great.)
Eat lots of veggies and greens with each meal,
eat good quality protein at eat meal.
Eat whole fruit or raw nuts/seeds between meals if you want a snack
Drink half body weight in oz of filtered water daily, but drink it mostly between meals. Don’t drink more than 4oz of fluids at a meal, this stresses the stomach by diluting digestive juices, prolonging food time in the stomach before it empties into the small intestine.
If you weigh 150 pounds then drink about 75 oz of water per day.
Don’t count caffeinated beverages since their diuretic effect causes excessive fluid loss through the kidneys. Dryer climates necessitate more fluid intake, humid climates less.
Don’t eat transfats. They are found in fried foods, roasted nuts including peanut butter, vegetable spreads (fake butter) like margarine, most baked goods that are packaged and don’t need refrigerating like muffins and cookies crackers and chips.
Cook with coconut oil to avoid creating transfats in your kitchen. Butter is okay if you don’t brown it, olive oil is okay if fresh and cooked on low heat. It’s best to just steam or bake things without oil. You can drizzle uncooked oils over your food once on your plate for taste.
Olive oil oxidizes quickly, so best to buy small bottles and use it all within 10 days of opening it. If it tastes different than the day you opened it, it’s starting to go bad.
Quality meats are fresh meats from wild or grain free animals. Organic or conventional is up to you, the Organic label doesn’t necessarily stand for the high quality it used to now that the government regulators have sold out to big corporate farming practices. It’s best to know your farmers and find out how they feed and treat their animals.
If you are too busy to find a smart, health conscious, and ethical livestock farmer, one alternative source of quality protein would be vegetable source protein powder. Just eat lots of veggies and greens, then take enough protein shake to cover your protein needs. Or, maybe you can find a source of well fed chickens to buy eggs from. Just don’t fry them in oils that turn to transfats.
Babies need 1 gram of protein per pound of weight per day. Children need about 1/2 gram protein per pound per day, adults need about 1/3 gram protein per pound per day, and pregnant or breastfeeding moms need about 2/3 gram of protein per pound per day. Of course the more physically active you are the more you need, so athletes can need double or triple these numbers.
Eggs have about 6 grams of protein each. Veggies and greens tend to have 2-3 grams of protein per half cup serving. Don’t use soy sourced protein products. Rice, pea, hemp seed, acacia would be safer than soy. See Dr. Brownstein’s book Soy Deception for more info on avoiding soy. Most don’t need to be religious about avoiding soy, but eating it as your main source of protein is not recommended.
Keep your saturated, omega 3, and omega 6 fats balanced, and keep transfats at zero.
It’s a big involved topic, but here’s some tips.
Use high quality fish oil capsules to keep omega 3 levels optimal. Unless you have a source of fresh wild small fish like sardines, anchovies, trout, or similar, to eat daily, you’ll need to take a couple capsules of fish oil daily. See chapter on Dr. C’s daily supplements for healthy longevity.
Don’t eat roasted nuts or seeds regularly. Fresh raw nuts/seeds are safe, but in moderation. Most are high in omega 6, not bad by itself, but if you get more 6 than 3 (fish oil) then you will tend to have more inflammation than otherwise. Theoretically you could eat lots of raw nuts if counterbalanced with extra fish oil capsules.
Saturated fats usually implies animal fats. Meats and milks from grain fed animals are highest in saturated fats. Even farm raised salmon is high in saturated and omega 6 fats because they are generally fed grains. Saturated fats are not bad, but too many in relation to the amount of omega 3 fats in your body causes inflammation.
We cannot make omega 3 in our bodies, but we can make saturated fats. We turn carbs into saturated fats when we overeat them, especially refined carbs from grains, like breads and pastas.
If you are overweight, most of your fat is likely saturated or omega 6 fat. And much of it could be transfats! So you have a long way to go to get your fats balanced, let alone losing weight. See chapter on weight loss.
Animal meats that are not grain fed will have less saturated fat and more omega 3 and 6 fats. This is good for you, but mostly if you eat the meat raw. Omega 3 and 6 fats turn to transfats when overlooked, saturated fats do not. I’m not suggesting that you eat raw meat but just making a point. Grass fed meats are a double edged sword. Less saturated fat but more likely to get transfats when cooking. So best to cook grass fed meats at lower temperatures. Increase the cooking time some to make up for this. And of course the least cooked the less transfats.
As far as digestible animal proteins, the smaller the animal the easier it tends to be to digest.
There are good sources of non fish omega 3, from algae oil. Flax seed or hemp seed oil can be used too, but extra steps are required by the body to utilize these oils.
Taking a poor quality fish oil is WORSE than not taking a fish oil at all. DO NOT try to save money buying cheap fish oil, you are shooting yourself in the foot. If you are too poor to buy high quality fish oil, don’t take any. Or just take high quality fish oil every other day or every third day, whatever you can afford. Take nothing on days between.
Avoid foods with added sugar like desserts and soda, and in general, don’t drink fruit juice. Sugar is usually made of 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Fruit juice has lots of fructose as well. Fructose is thought to be the cause of 75% of heart disease. It also contributes to developing diabetes, obesity, and gout. See Dr Robert Lustig’s you tube videos and his 60 Minutes episode on the toxicity of sugar. He runs a child obesity clinic at UCSF. He says that he recommends that kids do 5 things to lose weight like playing outside and refraining from video games, but he says that the one variable that makes or breaks their success is fruit juice. If they drink it, they stay fat, if the don’t drink it they lose weight.
Put some effort into rotating families of foods or at least eating a wide variety of families. For instance, if you eat steamed kale with your eggs for breakfast, cabbage rolls with mustard greens for lunch, and broccoli and turnips as sides for dinner, you are only eating one family of vegetables: brassicas. Just like a poodle and a Great Dane are both the same species, broccoli all the above vegetables mentioned were “bred” by farmers over the years from cabbages.
Plant families tend to have similar nutrient profiles and similar toxin profiles. All plants have small amounts of toxins that aim to prevent animals from overindulging in eating them into extinction. Generally animals nibble on plants before moving onto other types of plants. This ensures no one toxin builds up in their system, and the plants can recover from the damage sustained from the animal foraging.
Cooking vegetables breaks down some of the plant toxins, but it also breaks down some of the vitamins. So cooking vegetables mild to moderately is a good idea generally. Eating 10-25% of your vegetables raw and cooking the rest might be wise. Green smoothies can be a great way to get more raw veggies into your diet. See chapter on green smoothies.
But eating a wide variety of families is also wise.
List of plant families:
Brassica,: kale, cabbage, mustard, turnip, radish,
Spinach: chard, beets,
Melon: squash,
Asparagus
Artichoke
Okra
Cactus
Lettuce, sunflower, dandelion
Mushroom
Ginger
Onion, garlic, chives, leeks
Carrot, anise, celery, parsley, dill, cumin, caraway, fennel, parsnip
Pea, beans, soy, clover, peanut
Nightshade, tomato, eggplant, potato, yam, peppers
Sweet potato
Coconut
Olive
Rose: Apple, pear, plum, peach, nectarine, almond, apricot, strawberry, cherry, raspberry blackberry boysenberry cranberry
Avocado
Blueberry
Mint
Rice
Wheat
Corn
Aloe
Amaranth
Borage
Walnut
Brazil nut
Macadamia
Chestnuts
Breadfruit
Pine nut
As you can see, most of what we eat is only in a few food familys: wheat, corn, rice, soy, brassica, nightshade, rose, onion for the most part. The idea is not to be over concerned about this but to just count how many groups you tend to eat and see if you can expand your groups a little bit each month. Perhaps avoid or minimize some of the groups that find their way into everything we eat, like wheat, corn and soy.
Looking Forward!
Yours in health,
Dr. Campise
Fresno Chiropractor
#fresnochiropractor #neuroemotional #hyperbaric #lighttherapy #homeopathy #chelation