Eating Well

The media seem constantly preoccupied these days with diet.  Not just in the old sense of weight loss, but also in terms of eating what's good for you.  There's certainly some truth in most of them - it seems that eating vegetables and whole grains is probably a pretty good thing, for example.  But at the same time, there's a lot of nonsense out there.

Take, for example, the idea of "body ecology^TM" that recently came to my attention.  The idea is to avoid eating certain categories of food in combination with certain other categories.  Unfortunately the categories are immensely broad.  Check out the website, particularly the "food combining chart," and perhaps you'll be persuaded that you shouldn't ever eat berries and yogurt with your cereal, or should avoid a pepperoni pizza, because these combinations include food groups that don't get along.  If you're the type that confuses mild occasional gas with "allergy," this approach may be right up your alley, and it may even help you.  But it's not for me.

I realize this idea will attract a certain following, at least until another fad diet comes along, but to me, it's just overreaching.  (Except where it underreaches - it appears for example that some fruits - nonacidic ones - aren't accounted for at all.)  I think the problem is that like many dietary suggestions, it tries to improve on nature.  I'm especially suspicious when the whole concept is trademarked, as this one is.  Nature don't do trademarks!

The evidence of our entire digestive system (our several types of teeth, for example) is that human body is designed to eat pretty much all types of foodstuffs, anything that isn't fatally poisonous.  Based on that, I've found that I can boil down questions of diet to a couple of simple principles:

Eat everything.
Don't eat too much of any one thing.

Or to put it another way, variety and moderation.  The first principle is modified by foods to which you may be truly allergic - i.e., you break out in a rash and can't breathe.  And some of us have a little trouble with the second one.  That's where will power takes over.  Otherwise, it's pretty simple.  Don't mess with Mother Nature.