The subtitle of this article should be: When is eating healthy — not?

You shouldn’t be surprised when I say that the quality of our food has deteriorated over the past several decades. The good nutrition that characterized our grandparents’ diet is no longer available to us by just eating right. For example, when all chickens were allowed to roam free eating insects from the ground along with their feed, chicken soup was the universal cure for the common cold in many households; the protein content of the bugs eaten by the birds was translated to a number of substances in their fat and tissue that had health benefits when consumed by humans. But now, assembly-line chickens fed on a prescribed diet — vegetarian, cheap and profitable — don’t have access to those yummy little crawlers. The result is that their meat and fat are devoid of the very nutrition on which sick kids of all regional and ethnic backgrounds depended.

I will leave politics out of this discussion, but with each passing decade since the 1950s, the nutritional quality of our food has been drastically reduced. Chickens are bred to have robust breasts, while their meat provides only a fraction of the nutritional benefit it did in years past.

Eating a healthy diet — a nutritious diet — may be neither healthy nor nutritious anymore.

Perhaps I should first answer the question, What is Nutrition? Simply — perhaps, too simply — it’s the proper quantity and proportion of fats, proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, and trace elements that lead to health in a person. So, what are those foods? The answer is not simple. Not every nutritious food or mixture of foods is nutritious for everyone.

Let’s look at an extreme example. The diet eaten by Inuit peoples — formerly termed Eskimos — is very high in fat with few vegetables. It is natural and beneficial to these Native Americans. Their diet would kill the average American of European or African descent. In fact, it’s the exact diet that is killing an ever increasing number of people in Western nations, especially the US, each year.

For this reason the definition of nutrition must allow for the fact that nutrition is different for each individual. Fortunately, scientific research has demonstrated that people tend to fall into broad categories of nutrition Types based on their genetic makeup. And, because we are all 99.9% identical in that genetic makeup, there are a few universal suggestions to begin any regimen to attain and/or retain good health.

So first the fundamentals:

• Everyone should drink naturally ALKALINE spring water, free from the contaminants found in tap water, such as chlorine, fluorine, and heavy metals. Fluorine? How can I not have fluorine? you ask. Well, while fluorine hardens the enamel of the teeth, it also stresses your thyroid and can cause systemic health issues. Brush more diligently — nix the fluorine!
• Incorporate antioxidant foods in your diet such as green leafy vegetables and berries. It’s easiest to simply drink your veggies by choosing a good quality green powdered drink or by juicing fresh vegetables – no, the popular V-drink is not sufficient.
• Take supplements. Even if you eat Organic foods — higher in nutrition than non-organic varieties — everyone needs supplements: a good quality vitamin/mineral and a pro-biotic, plus fatty acids such as fish and/or seed oil, in addition to the green drink.
• Exercise just 15 minutes, three to four times each week using a program such as T-Tapp that works the entire lymphatic system and engages the 8 muscle groups; I do it myself, you can do it too. If you think that you can’t afford 15 minutes every other day, then try to imagine yourself managing your life from a hospital bed for two or three weeks – think about it – really!

But then there’s that extra 0.1% that constitutes our genetic differences. That’s what make some people tall and other short, some stocky and others slim, and makes some require large proportions of meat protein in their diets and others require little or none. This small different in our genes is what locks us into to nutritional — or Metabolic — types.

There are a number of methods for determining the best foods for you. I’ve spoken about Metabolic Type Analysis (MTA) in my previous article and believe that it is the least intrusive and easiest way to place you in a metabolic type group. Seek the counsel of a Certified Metabolic Type Advisor. After completing an extensive and comprehensive questionnaire — which will take you more than one cup of green tea to go through — the CMTA will have the information necessary to place you in a type category and prepare a written evaluation of your required foods and banned foods.

If you have tried modifying your eating habits and perhaps tried to self-diagnose by following the suggestions of how-to articles and books, and have not seen any improvements, you may need a more specific means of determining your issues. Body Chemistry Diagnostics (BCD) is an excellent adjunct to MTA. It allows the learned practitioner to assess the state of your body’s health and find systemic imbalances that might mask any improvement due to improved nutrition. If you break your arm you need to mend the arm before addressing the issue of frail bones. Similarly, BCD can be very effective by allowing your practitioner to develop a protocol of supplements and a list of must-have and must-avoid foods to bring you back to where the best-fit diet indicated by MTA will keep you healthy. BCD requires a saliva and urine sample which are analyzed to determine the state of 11 key bio-markers indicating the status of your body’s biochemical processes. Look to a later article for more details about BCD.

Finally, allow me to introduce another diagnostic procedure — Iridological Examination. By closely examining your iris — the colored part of your eye — an iridologist can literally see your genetic strengths and weaknesses. If done thoroughly by a practitioner with years of experience, this procedure is required just once and can provide invaluable information you can use for the rest of your life – but this, too, for another time.