It Starts With Food

Those are the first words of Chapter 1: “Food Should Make You Healthy.”

Every bite we take is either making us more healthy or less healthy. +1 or -1.

Now, when we apply this +1/-1 idea to our lives in general, it’s pretty straight-forward. What we’re about to do in this moment is either a step forward into growth or back into not-so-great.

With nutrition, it’s not quite as simple. We know some things that just aren’t optimal (hello, donut + can of Coke!) but there are a lot of other things that fall into the ambiguous zone of confusion given all the different nutritional theories out there.

Helping us make the process easy is, of course, what this book is all about.

How we go about doing that is the subject of the next Big Idea.

P.S. Once you know what you believe is best for you, you may choose to eat food that you know is not making you more healthy—which, of course, is fine. We just want to do that consciously rather than compulsively and make that sub-optimal meal the exception rather than the rule.

An experiment of ONE.

Ultimately, that’s what this book is about—presenting a plan, backing it up with some science and clinical experience that supports their perspective and then, most importantly, teaching you how to TEST IT ON YOURSELF.

This is what got me and Alexandra to try the Whole30 approach.

We were weeks away from welcoming our son, Emerson, into the world. Alexandra was dealing with some skin issues that had persisted for over a decade—resistant to all of her attempts to resolve it via what we thought was a healthy diet. (At the time, that was a lower-fat vegan diet with a lot of grains.)

Alexandra read the book and was inspired by the possibilities of removing grains (one of the key things Whole30 removes) to see if that would help with her skin issues. I was (very) skeptical at first but I was open as I knew I could optimize my health as a) I always felt hungry and b) I got migraines once every month or two.

And… Ultimately, what got me to make the leap and test the approach was the fact that we were naming our son Emerson after one of my heroes: Ralph Waldo Emerson. This brilliant line echoed in my head and became our mantra as we made the leap: “All life is an experiment. The more experiments the better.”

If all of life is an experiment and the more experiments the better, then it was time to quit being so dogmatic and be willing to do some experimenting.

And, alas, the experiment worked for both of us. Alexandra’s skin issues cleared up (and haven’t returned) and my energy levels stabilized and, whereas I used to always be on guard that I may get a migraine if I skipped a meal or didn’t get a good night of sleep, I haven’t had to worry about migraines since removing the grains (+ veggie oils).

But, alas, that’s just OUR data.

What’s YOUR experience with different foods? The only way to find out is to remove the potential toxic triggers for a period of time and see what happens then, if you’re feeling it, systematically add them back one by one and see what happens.

The Hartwigs present their Whole30 guide to do this. Mark Hyman has a similar 21-day reboot in Eat Fat, Get Thin; David Ludwig has a 2 -eek reboot followed by a reintroduction phase in Always Hungry? and Alejandro Junger has his approach in Clean Gut.

It’s a REALLY powerful way to see what works for YOU.

Ultimately, that’s the only science that really matters. So, grab your lab coat and let’s get to work!

Although I don’t consider myself “Paleo” per se, I DO think it’s smart to look at how our bodies evolved and what we likely ate over tens of thousands/millions of years of evolution.

I like the way John Durant (in The Paleo Manifesto) walks us through the five different epochs of human existence (Animal, Paleolithic, Agricultural, Industrial, Information) and what we can learn from each to be healthy today. Check out that Note for more.

Highlights for me include the fact that grains were a MINISCULE part of our diet pre-agricultural revolution and now we consume 150 pounds of wheat alone.

And, I love The Happiness Dietguys’s comment: “Over the course of the past two hundred years, we’ve increased our sugar intake by 3,000 percent. This is the single biggest change to the human diet since the invention of fire.”

And, of course, I don’t think it makes sense to have 20% of our calories come from soybean oil—something that we DID NOT eat *at all* 100 years ago. I don’t think we need to think about that too hard to realize that makes no sense. (Same goes for all veggie and seed oils, btw.)

Throw in all the other consequences of industrialized food processing and we see that we eat very little REAL FOOD—most of it is what Michael Pollan calls “edible foodlike substances.” Again, it doesn’t make any sense to me to eat foodlike stuff our great-great-grandmothers didn’t eat and wouldn’t recognize as food.

Sugar, grains, and veggie/seed oils are all removed from our diets on Whole30. The focus? Whole, real foods.

P.S. For me, the most challenging aspect of the Whole30 experiment was eating animals again. Of course, that’s all part of a longer vegan vs. Paleo chat. But, what IS clear is that if we choose to consume animal products, we *must* stop eating food from factory farms.

99% (!) of all animals consumed in the US are currently raised in industrialized, factory farms. In addition to being horrific from both an ethical (treatment of both animals and employees) and that environmental perspective, it’s also toxic for your health.

Factory-farmed animals are not fed their natural diet. They’re fed seeds and grains (and other bizarre things) that makes them sick (hence, livestock get more antibiotics than humans) and disrupts the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids.

So, the Hartwigs advise: Choose the highest quality, grass-fed/organic/wild caught and most humanely raised animals you can. Make THIS organic before you worry about the veggies and fruits. And, if you *do* get industrialized animal products, stay away from the super-processed hot dogs and bacon and go with lean cuts. Although the fat in grassfed meat is healthy, the fat in factory-farmed products is NOT—not because of the saturated fat per se but because fat is where all the toxins (antibiotics, growth hormones, etc.) from their factory-farmed bodies are stored and then transferred to you.

That’s from Chapter #3: “What Is Food?” in which we get introduced to the four criteria of the Whole30 good food standards.

Let’s take a quick look at each:

1. The food we eat should promote a healthy psychological response.

This is Rule #1. Does the food we’re eating trigger an unhealthy psychological response? David Ludwig has tested this extensively and PROVEN that ultraprocessed, fast-acting carbs light up your nucleus accumbens—the same “reward center” that lights up for people addicted to cocaine and alcohol. That would qualify as an unhealthy response. Which is why removing fast-acting carbs (sugar, pizza, bread, pasta, etc.) is part of his Phase I: Conquer Cravings.

2. The food we eat should promote a healthy hormonal response.

Ludwig echoes this wisdom as well. He tells us: “Foods with similar nutrients can affect hormones and metabolism in profoundly different ways, determining whether we store or burn calories, build fat or muscle, feel hungry or satisfied, struggle with weight or maintain a healthy weight effortlessly, and suffer from or avoid chronic inflammation.” The Hartwigs walks us through how our food choices affect everything from insulin to cortisol. Powerful stuff.

3. The food we eat should support a healthy gut.

As we discussed in Clean Gut, it ALL starts in the gut. Alejandro Junger tells us: “Healing the gut is the single most important step we can take to ensure our lifelong health.” Again, certain foods are disrupting the health of our gut and we need to eliminate those toxic triggers!

4. The food we eat should support immune function and minimize inflammation.

Inflammation is at the root of ALL disease. Therefore, we want to make sure our food choices are anti-inflammatory rather than inflammatory. Key culprits: grains, veggie/seed oils, dairy.

That’s from a chapter in which we learn about the potential toxicity of grains.

First: Did you know grains are SEEDS? Yep. Wheat, corn, rice. All seeds from grasses.

One of the top 5 consequences of industrialized food production that Michael Pollan talks about in In Defense of Food is that we went from eating a ton of leaves to eating a ton of seeds. (Note: That wasn’t a good switch.)

So, EVERYONE agrees that refined flour is not a good idea. Yet, a lot of people insist that “whole grains” are awesome and should be a staple of our diets.

I say, run the experiment on yourself. See how you feel with and without them. You may handle them just fine. I do not.

I also REALLY like this perspective: “Another way that a diet high in grains leads to suboptimal nutrition is in terms of opportunity cost: If there are more whole grains on your plate, then there’s probably less of some other food—like vegetables—on your plate. And that lowers the overall micronutrient density in your diet too. In summary:

There is not a single health-promoting substance present in grains that you can’t also get from vegetables and fruit.”

That’s a powerful perspective to consider: When we’re loading up on grains, we’re potentially loading up on toxic triggers and definitely crowding out room for vegetables—which have all the nutrients you’d get in grains without the potential risks.

P.S. In terms of the marketing of cereal grains, remember that, as Pollan tells us: “When corn oils and chips and sugary breakfast cereals can all boast being good for your heart, health claims have become hopelessly corrupt. The American Heart Association currently bestows (for a fee) its heart-healthy seal of approval on Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, and Trix cereals… Meanwhile, the genuinely heart- healthy whole foods in the produce section, lacking the financial and political clout of the packaged goods a few aisles over, are mute. But don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.”

Your personal health equation.

I agree with the Hartwigs that it STARTS with food. You can’t out-exercise a bad diet and you’re just not going to sleep or psychologically function optimally with a bad diet.

So, let’s start there. And have fun integrating other Big Ideas from Movement 101, Sleep 101, Love 101, Purpose 101, Confidence 101, Habits 101, Creativity 101 and… :)