[?] Subscribe To This Site

Healthy Eating Guidelines

These healthy eating guidelines encourage you to eat fresh, whole, unprocessed, traditional, and organic foods. Increasing these foods leaves less room for unhealthy foods.

The most unhealthy foods are those processed with specific harmful ingredients. Simply avoiding those unhealthy ingredients can benefit you immediately.

Not every healthy food is good for everybody. Even a healthy food can cause digestive or other problems. As you become more conscious of what you eat, it becomes easier to detect how specific foods make you feel.

For more on the reasons behind these guidelines, take a look at these healthy eating facts.

Guidelines

1. Eat more fruits and vegetables.

2. Eat more whole foods. Fresh, whole, unprocessed, unrefined foods are always healthy foods.

Whole foods include fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, whole grains, beans and other legumes, nuts, seeds, seaweed (sea vegetables), unprocessed meat without additives, organ meat without additives, fish and shellfish without additives, raw milk, and eggs.

3. Use unrefined salt.

4. Eat healthy fats instead of unhealthy fats.

Some healthy fats: extra virgin olive oil, unrefined flax seed oil, unrefined coconut oil, butter, nuts and nut butters.

Is it OK for your heart to eat healthy fats? See the book Fat and Cholesterol Are Good For You!

Some unhealthy fats: trans fats (partially hydrogenated oils), margarine, commercial salad dressing, refined vegetable oils.

5. Eat more foods that are extracted, cultured, or otherwise prepared with traditional methods, rather than with modern industrial food processing methods. An example is traditionally-made (not commercially made) sauerkraut.

6. If possible, eat more organic foods. Organic foods can be found at natural food stores and health food stores, but also at Wal-Mart, many supermarkets, and online stores.

7. Try superfoods such as wheatgrass juice.

8. Eat less processed food. For examples, see this list of processed foods.

9. Eat fewer foods with unhealthy ingredients, such as food additives. Read ingredients lists on food labels. The most harmful ingredients include:

Artificial sweeteners
Monosodium glutamate (MSG) and yeast extract
High fructose corn syrup (HFCS)
Trans fats: partially hydrogenated oils
Nitrites and other additives to processed meat
Genetically modified corn, soy, and sugar

10. Pay attention to how specific foods affect your health. Not every healthy food is good for everybody. Common problem foods are:

Gluten (wheat, barley, rye, spelt)
Dairy foods
Nightshade vegetables

More Healthy Eating Guidelines

Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism, frequently writes about the Western diet and the American food production system. His healthy eating guidelines, in this New York Times Magazine article, Unhappy Meals, begin simply, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

The food he refers to are whole foods. "Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food," he writes. He ends his article with nine guidelines on choosing and enjoying food.

Pollan's book In Defense Of Food expands on this article.

The Weston A. Price Foundation is dedicated to traditional foods and traditional farming methods. Weston A. Price was a dentist and researcher in the early 20th century who visited the remaining traditional peoples of the world and documented the health-giving effects of traditional diets.

The Foundation's Dietary Guidelines emphasize whole foods and traditional foods, and its Dietary Dangers are guidelines for avoiding the worst elements of processed and industrial foods.

Return from Healthy Eating Guidelines to Getting Started With Healthy Eating Home