How to eat right for your health and upgrade recipes part 3....

Today's Post: Friday, 9-23-2011

This is my fourth post in the 8 ways to stay healthy.

2. Eat only foods that benefit you and your health – or at least do no harm.

(We did the first one in this series on Friday, 9-9: 1. Avoid harmful foods and drinks. And, we repost the list of all 8 ways at the end of today’s post.)

This post is part 3 of eating OK and good for you foods. The post on Monday, 9-12 was part one. The post last Friday, 9-16 was part two.

C. There are several foundation blocks for foods that actually benefit you and your health to eat.

In an earlier post in this series we covered the two kinds of health supporting oils, monosaturated fats and omega 3 oils, particularly those found in fish.

Besides those, the three most important kinds are health OK plant protein foods, health OK animal protein foods, and nonstarchy vegetables.

(Fruit and starchy vegetables can be OK but need special handling and although sometimes very beneficial, they are less essential and more a nice to have option than OK plant protein foods, health OK animal protein foods, and nonstarchy vegetables.)

This post is about health OK animal protein foods.

There is some evidence that the Paleo diet and the low carb, high protein diet for fat loss are mostly sound. They work to produce good health and to keep you trim and reasonably lean.

Before 10,000 years ago almost everyone ate that way. That means that for the hundreds of thousands of years before 10,000 years ago, our genetic patterns were based on eating that way.

That specifically means that if you have excess fat you want to remove and never get back, you will get better results if you eat in this way. Despite earlier efforts to ignore the evidence or think it faked, people who eat a paleo diet or a high protein, low carb diet do tend to get and stay trim. So, permanently upgrading your eating habits to a version of these diets is one of the keys to losing excess fat you then keep off.

But there have been some changes since 10,000 years ago in the content and health effects of animal protein foods.

Some animal protein foods are as good as they were 10,000 years ago. Some are almost as good.

But the majority of animal protein foods in most stores today are not good for you to eat in terms of their impact on your health. One kind has recently been found to be pretty harmful in fact.

One kind even will help prevent you from losing fat even though you have cut back on carbs and eliminated the most fattening carbs!

It seems many kinds of animal protein foods, I just found out, are treated with an effective fattener. Then if you eat those, you get the fattener along with the protein! Yikes!

There are two solutions to this.

One is to eat health OK plant protein foods too. That’s practical since the lower cost of those helps make eating the health OK animal protein foods that cost more, considerably more doable. Even better, plant protein foods tend to improve your health in ways complementary to animal protein foods. They also have fiber that helps you feel full and not hungry better than just eating animal protein foods and nonstarchy vegetables is able to do.

The second solution is in three parts.

The health damaging animal protein foods have several problems. Their fat contains excessive amounts of the chronic inflammation producing omega 6 oils from the grains they are fed. They are often deliberately fattened by penning them up and by giving them estrogen which has a fattening effect. Because the grain the animals are fed is grown with pesticides and herbicides, the fat in the animals has pesticides and herbicides in it but more bioconcentrated than it was in the grain they ate.

Then, some of these animal protein foods from grain fed animals are also “processed” by adding preservatives and excess salt. Researchers recently found the preservatives, high amounts of nitrates and nitrites, cause damage to the insides of your blood vessels which acts as heart attack, stroke, and high blood pressure starter. Even worse, processed meats tend to be fattier meats.

So, the three parts of this solution are:

a) Eat less animal protein foods and when you do so, mostly eat those that were able to eat their natural diet. The best choice now is to eat wild caught fish that are high in omega 3 oils but low in mercury and other pollutants. Sardines, herring, small mackerel, and wild caught salmon are examples. (Farmed fish not only do not fit, they tend to contain so much of so many pollutants that they are the worst kind of animal protein to eat if you want to keep your health!)

The other choice is to eat 100 % grass fed beef, lamb, or buffalo or eat poultry that was only pasture fed in an area where the pasture was pollutant free.

b) Since most of the problem with protein from grain fed animals is in their fat, when you do eat these foods, make it as lean and fat free as you can manage.

Butcher’s Kitchen and Jaccard make mechanical meat tenderizers that can enable this kind of very lean meat to be decently tender. And you can add back extra virgin olive oil to carry flavors and add to the hunger reducing ability of the meat.

Skinless poultry also works.

For these foods, slow cooking in a Crock Pot or other slow cooker also works well.

(These cooking methods also work with 100% grass fed meats since they too tend to be quite lean.)

I recently found out that nonfat and 1% lowfat milk have had inflammatory dried milk added. But 2% lowfat milk has only about half the fat of whole milk and avoids that problem.

Eggs have so much very high quality protein and the yolks have so many powerfully helpful nutrients and not that much fat, they are a good idea to eat a few times a week. They tend to raise your beneficial HDL cholesterol.

That means eating some eggs is OK even if the chickens were grain fed. Of course, when you can get eggs from chickens that were pasture fed in an area where the pasture was pollutant free, that’s the best kind. They not only have fewer harmful ingredients, they have more nutrition and look and taste noticeably better.

c) The third part of this solution is to eat the most harmful kinds of animal protein far less and to eat the most health OK animal protein foods and health OK plant protein more.

Many people eat a processed meat every day for breakfast. Bacon, sausage, and ham are common. (Once or twice a month or never is dramatically better for you!)

Then they eat a processed meat or a grain fed meat for lunch.

Then they eat a grain fed meat for dinner.

Yikes!

That can work for fat loss. But it is a health disaster otherwise. And, the people who now eat that way would lose more fat and keep it off better eating only health OK proteins instead. The estrogen and other chemicals in these purposely fattened animals gets into the blood stream of the people who eat this way. The health OK proteins have none of these things in them

Health OK animal protein foods and health OK plant protein foods do NOT have these problems. In fact, wild caught fish high in omega 3 and beans and lentils even have some antidotes for these problems!

Our next post in this series will be about the health OK plant protein foods.

* * * *

Here’s the 8 ways to protect your health. (This post above has been following up on the first method with what to do instead.)

There are many, many ways to stay healthy.

But I find these eight ways cover most of the best and most effective methods.

1. Avoid harmful foods and drinks.

2. Eat only foods that benefit you and your health – or at least do no harm.

3. Get regular exercise every week -- mostly doing the most beneficial kinds.

4. Take key supplements.

(For almost every one of the diseases that are in your family history or which millions of people now get or which will kill you if you get them, there are supplements known to prevent or help prevent those diseases.) Hopefully we will get to keep this one as it can add so much to your protection.

5. Avoid tobacco and its smoke.

(Even though they cause 30% of all cancers, some smokers escape cancer. But EVERY exposure to them begins to cause heart disease, damage your lungs, and increase your rate of aging. No one exposed to tobacco smoke escapes this harm! That includes light smokers, teen smokers, and babies exposed to second hand smoke.)

6. Practice some form of physical stress control most days.

(So far, tai chi looks to be the most effective and time efficient way to do this.)

7. Become a purposeful, playful, proactive, and prudent optimist.

(Such people make good things happen and avoid bad ones. Also learn ways to survive and overcome difficulties and bad times that happen anyway.)

8. Practice other key prevention steps. (Brush and floss your teeth and gums well every day. Always wear your seat belt. Get your key blood indicators checked so you don’t get harmed by a problem you could have fixed first. There are more. But those 3 are extremely protective.)

Covering these 8 will turn into a series since each one deserves its own post.