Doctor what can I eat

One of the most important things for your health is what you put in your mouth. Everyone has heard the old adage “you are what you eat”. I modify that and say you are what you digest, because you can eat the best food in the world, but if you do not digest it into the usable parts (vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fats), it does not matter what you eat. However, putting digestion aside, what are we suppose to eat. Well everyday a new diet is coming out. The most recent is whole 30. I contend that it is not rocket science. For each of my patients I do a customized computerized diet therapy. I put in all their particulars to include blood type, diagnosis code, my biases for which vitamins, minerals and fats. They leave their second visit with a PDF of 300 different food. It is color coded and they know exactly what foods to avoid and what foods are good for them. Given that not everyone can see me, I do want to put out some basic guidelines. Keep in mind each person is different and in my practice everyone is addressed with that premises. So the following are general guidelines.

1. First it is important to note that we as humans are not good adaptors to environmental changes. We just don’t reproduce fast enough. If we are amoeba, yeast or cancer cells, we are constantly reproducing. As such they can adapt to environmental changes quickly. In fact cancer can adapt and become resistant to chemo quite quickly. Now I do some things with my cancer patients to reduce the resistance, but the premise is the same. The faster you reproduce the faster you can modify the genes to adapt to the change. Since humans reproduced every 12 years way back when and now every 30 years, we are horrible adaptors. In fact there are some that say that it takes humans 80 thousand years to adapt to an environmental change.

2. Ok so the second question is what did we eat 80 thousand years ago, or even 10 thousand or even a soon as 3000 years ago before we became an agrarian society. It is well documented that we lived by water. Had to have water. What is in water?, Fish, snails, crawdads etc. What came down to the water? Grass fed animals. Now we did not have guns and fishing poles so these things where not that easy to get. No Safeway to purchase your Mammoth. So we did not eat a lot of protein. Many people think we were big hunters and ate a lot of meat. In fact meat was hard to come by and if we were able to get any, we shared it with our family of 50-100 people. We also only have enough stomach acid when we are in our prime to digest 3-4 ounces of protein at a time. Bottom line we did not eat a lot of meat.
protein was about 20% of our calories some of which came from animal protein but mostly plant food.

3. We have flat teeth. We know this is to serve as mortar and pestals to grind up fiber from plant food.

4. We ate a lot of insects. Insects are very high in fat and protein. Don’t worry you do not need to eat insects. Although I just read an article about a new protein powder make from cricket legs???

What do all of these food sources have? All are high in fat. In fact, if you look closely, our diet pre-agriculturally was 75% fat, 20 % protein ad 5 % carbs . What is the standard American Diet, 15% fat, 20 % protein and 65% carbs.. Both Doctor Perlmutter, in Grain brain, and Dr Wahls in the Wahls protocol talk about this.

What is the result of the shift from 75% fat to 15% fat and 5 % carbs to 65% carbs. Look around you. Obesity, Diabetes, Heart disease Cancer and Alzheimers.

We need to get back to how were are designed to eat. High fat, moderate protein, and low carb.

Bottom line. We have to choose the right food, and digest it properly. More healthy fat like coconut milk and oil, nut and seed butters, olives and olive oil, avocado, to name a few.

Best in health,

Cynthia Bye, ND, FABNO
Board Certified in Naturopathic Oncology
www.cynthiabye.com