Why you should love old food
Anyone who knows me would know that I’m not very dogmatic when it comes to nutrition. I’m a fan of the 80:20 approach and I encourage dietary diversity. Why? Because increasing dietary diversity reduces the risk of almost every chronic disease. We also want food CHOICES, not food RULES.It's when people believe that they have to eliminate entire food groups to achieve good health that alarm bells ring. Rather than cutting out ALL grain, or ALL dairy, or ALL sugar, or ALL fat… I think we should look at what the BEST of all of these categories are, and include these foods into our diet in a balanced way. Within each of these families, there are healthy options!To determine what the best of these categories are, I ask three questions:
- How has the food been grown or raised?
- How has the food been prepared?
- How long have we been consuming it for?
These pictures illustrate my point.
I’m not saying that we NEED to eat sourdough, butter and honey to be healthy; I’m simply saying that we can’t box all grains as being detrimental, or all sweeteners are being detrimental. A traditionally prepared sourdough made with an ancient grain like spelt or kamut, shouldn’t be put in the same box as ultra-processed white bread made with hybridized modern wheat.This is one of the main reasons that I haven’t recommended 'grain-free', 'dairy-free' or 'sugar-free' diets in my online programs. Pregnancy and infancy are critical windows of development, and these are the times that dietary diversity (and therefore nutrient diversity) matters most.How a food is grown or raised, how it's prepared, how it's eaten and what it's origin is, are some of the biggest questions to ask when trying to determine whether a food is good for us or not.
