The Elements of a Healthy Diet, & How to Change
By Leo Babauta
One of the best things I ever did to change my life (along with exercise, mindfulness, simplicity and focus) is to teach myself to eat a healthy diet.
But one of the things that confused me early on was: what is a healthy diet? There are so many definitions of what’s healthy — low-fat, low-carb, Paleo, vegan, Mediterranean, raw, and so on. It can be pretty confusing.
While I risk making a lot of people angry with this article, I’m going to attempt to synthesize my personal research on healthy eating. This isn’t definitive, and I’m not a nutritionist, but I’ve been exploring a healthy diet and have read hundreds of articles on this, sorting the good from the bad.
Here’s what I believe is healthy.
Overall Principles
A diet is healthy if it:
gives your body nutrients it needs,
without giving you too many calories (too many calories leads to obesity over time),
or unhealthy things (like too much saturated or trans fat, nitrates, excess sodium, unhealthy chemicals).
This definition is for the long term, not day to day. On any given day, you could have less nutrients than you need, and too many calories and sodium, but if the diet balances out over time, then it can be healthy.
So healthy food contributes to that: a good nutrient-to-calorie ratio without a lot of the bad stuff.
What kind of nutrients does your body need? It needs essential amino acids (protein), healthy fats, some carbs for energy, and a bunch of vitamins and minerals like iron, calcium, Vitamin D, sodium, potassium, and so forth. Fiber is good too, and of course you need water. This obviously isn’t a complete list.
If a food gives you some of those nutrients, without a lot of empty calories, it’s probably healthy. For example, spinach gives you Fiber, Protein, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin E (Alpha Tocopherol), Vitamin K, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Vitamin B6, Folate, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Copper and Manganese and more. Without giving you a lot of calories or unhealthy things.
But half a loaf of white bread might give you a bunch of calories without too many nutrients (maybe a bit of protein and a few other vitamins). These are empty calories, and we want less of those.
Everything, though, is fine in moderation. You can eat bread without guilt if it’s just a smaller part of your diet, and the rest of your diet is full of nutrient-dense stuff. If your diet is mostly empty calories, that’s not healthy.
Nutritious Foods
With that in mind, here’s an incomplete list of foods I think are amazingly healthy:
Greens. Green leafy vegetables are the nutrient kings. They contain a ton of great vitamins and minerals, lots of fiber, not a lot of calories or other unhealthy things. Good examples: kale, spinach, broccoli, bok choy, mustard greens, green bell peppers, romaine lettuce.
Red, yellow & orange fruits & veggies. These colorful veggies add nutrients you won’t get as much elsewhere, like lycopene, potassium, vitamin C and beta-carotene (vitamin A). Good examples: carrots, squash, tomatoes, red and yellow bell peppers, sweet potatoes, squash, pumpkin, corn. Plus fruits: mangos, oranges, apricots, bananas, papaya.
Onions & garlic. I put these in all kinds of meals, and they have been shown to have cancer-protection properties.
Beans and such. Lentils, black beans, red beans, white beans, peas, mung beans — lots of fiber and minerals and protein. I absolutely love a good lentil soup or black bean burger or chili with various kinds of beans.
Nuts & seeds. Healthy fats and proteins — walnuts, almonds, cashews, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, quinoa.
Proteins. As a vegan, I get my protein from plants — vegetables and whole grains have protein, but you can get lots of it in tofu, tempeh, seitan, soymilk. If you’re not vegan, I recommend fish and poultry, with red meat in moderation (it’s been shown to increase risks of cancer, for example,
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