Do you eat a good mixed diet?

FOOD QUALITY
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a good mixed diet – do you? The evidence linking inadequate or unbalanced diets to the majority of the diseases of our modern world grows from year to year. The recent research done by Dr. Colin Campbell and explained in his book ‘The China Study’ suggests most modern diseases would practically disappear if we all ate better. There are two major components of this problem; the first is that the actual quality of the food produced and eaten has progressively fallen over the past 50 years, as intensive agriculture has replaced more traditional mixed husbandry that involved the recycling of compost to the soil. Land has become depleted of essential minerals and output increased with simple fertilisers that produce higher yields of less nutritious food. When the nutritional content of common foods are compared now with the same foods of 50 years ago, there are recorded falls in mineral and vitamin content of fifty percent or more. So to gain the same nutritional input we should be eating double portions of our carrots or greens!

DIET VARIETY
The second component of the problem is more complex. Patients visiting their doctors often enquire whether their diet has anything to do with their illness. They are usually reassured that if they eat a little meat, fish, cereals, fruit and veg, in other words a ‘good mixed diet’ they’ll have nothing to worry about. What though, is a good mixed diet? It is possible that early hunter-gatherer man ate a very varied diet; if it flew, swam, ran or grew then you could eat it! They ate perhaps as many as two thousand different food items including berries, roots, insects, animals, fishes, grasses, nuts, fungi, shellfish and more. With the rise of civilisations and more intensive farming, then the food industry revolution of modern times, the variety of foods we eat has diminished for most people.

Twenty years ago I began a study to look into this matter and came to the conclusion that there are many people who think they eat well though in fact have a very low variety in their diet. I developed a simple questionnaire that takes about five minutes to complete which measures a person’s ‘Diet Variety Index’ that can be compared with the population average to assess just how good their diet variety is in these terms.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?
Today many foods are grown on depleted soil, many animals graze on mineral deficient pastures, and many foods are denatured by processing or through storage. This leads to vitamin and mineral deficiencies in the foods we buy, and if we restrict ourselves to a small number of foods grown in a limited region the problem can be very serious. If however our range of fruit, grains and vegetables is wide and comes from many different sources the chances of serious deficiency in all of them is lessened. Some people, because of inherited digestive problems may find certain foods difficult to digest; lactose and gluten intolerance are widely known; these people will probably have more serious health prob- lems if their diet variety is low and includes the offending foods, simply because these foods will represent a large proportion of their dietary intake. Such people would suffer far less if they had a much more varied diet, when the occasional offending food would represent a very small proportion of their diet. The same argument would apply to the growing problem of food allergies. Although once sensitised to a particular food even a small quantity can produce a severe reaction, the early development of over-sensitivity may have been associated with repeated large intakes of the food ‘undiluted by many other foods’.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION TO A BIG PROBLEM
Is it possible that by simply increasing our diet variety of food from good soil, which is processed as little as possible, that we could eliminate or at least minimise the effect of so many food-induced diseases? I honestly believe it could be that simple.

READERS FREE OFFER
If you send me an email requesting your free ‘Diet Variety Index’ assessment to diet @totalhealthmatters.co.uk I will send you a dietary questionnaire for your completion. Once you have returned it to me completed I will assess your ‘Diet Variety Index’ and email you back with your result compared with a National Scale. Most people find by simply by doing this exercise it has helped them improve their diet, as it makes them more aware of foods they could add to their diet and others that they eat very rarely that could be eaten more often.

OPEN DAY
We are organising an Open Day at TotalHealthMatters! on Saturday 28th March, from 10am to 5pm. A great opportunity to learn more about Osteopathy, Buteyko Breathing Method, Hypnotherapy, NLP, Cranio-Sacral Therapy, and Life Coaching.
Michael Lingard BSc. DO. BBEC
Total Health Matters
St Bridgets
Rye Road
Hawkhurst Kent TN18 5DA
freephone 0800 781 2534