HolisticImprovement

Most people in America eat the Standard American Diet, also known as SAD. It is a diet full of empty carbs, processed meat, unhealthy sweeteners, and harmful oils. The SAD also lacks essential vitamins and minerals. The really sad part, though, is that nine out of ten Americans claim their diet is healthy.

Looking around you, you see unhealthy people almost everywhere you go: work or school, malls, movies, and especially at state fairs. It’s common knowledge that one third of Americans are obese, and another third are overweight. As a nation, we are spending trillions every year on “health-care” (it should be called sick-care), to fix health problems that generally could have been prevented through basic lifestyle and dietary changes. Your focus should be on preventing disease from forming instead of going to the doctor to cure health problems that have come up as a result of an unhealthy lifestyle.

Most Americans don’t know what a good diet actually consists of, and if they do, many choose not to eat that way. We all need to get off the SAD and start eating clean, healthy foods. The way America is eating is not working. By 2030, more than five million people will die every year before age 60 from non-communicable diseases linked to poor diets. Don’t become part of that scary statistic.

One of the main issues is that many millions of Americans choose what they eat based on taste alone. This seems like a child’s mentality. To ensure good health and longevity, you must eat with optimal nutrition in mind, which is basically getting what your body needs instead of only what your tongue wants. This is the mature, reasonable way to eat. Starting out, a healthy diet may not always taste as great because it isn’t pumped full of artificial sweeteners and flavor enhancers, but I can say from experience that you will develop a taste for healthy foods and after a while start to dislike the taste of many unhealthy foods.

Let’s take a quick look at why we are supposed to eat healthy foods, and why artificial and processed food is so negative for our health. Our bodies are not much different than they were five or ten thousand years ago. Our bodies still need what we needed thousands of years ago: clean, whole, natural foods. The reason that we have strong cravings for sugar and salt is that thousands of years ago, they were very rare, and since we need small amounts of them in our diet, we evolved to seek them out. Modern food companies take advantage of that and pump food with addictive sugars and salts because that tastes good to us, but is terrible for our health as we eat far too much of them. Giant food companies do not care about our health, only money, so they make what tastes good, no matter how bad it is for our health.

So, to unplug from the SAD and reclaim our health, we all need to start eating healthy. Eating healthy isn’t a matter of eating this food group instead of that food group, and isn’t some special diet. A healthy diet all comes down to cutting out some different unhealthy foods/ingredients/drinks from our diets, replacing them with foods that aren’t unhealthy. Yes, you will need to start reading nutrition facts and ingredients of what you buy. Trust me, it’s worth it.

The first basic pillar of a healthy diet is: If you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it. When reading through ingredients of processed foods, you will often come across things like: Acrylamide, Cochineal extract, diacetyl, tertiary butylhydroquinone, monosodium glutamate, BHA, etc. Don’t buy foods with ingredients that sound like this. Another good rule of thumb is: don’t eat foods with more than ten ingredients.

Don’t eat processed foods. A quick test to see if something’s processed is if it has more than a few ingredients, or if it needs people to change it into the form it’s in, such as hot dogs, sugary cereals, etc.

Don’t eat refined or cane sugar, hfcs (high-fructose corn syrup), or artificial sweeteners such as aspartame. I wrote an article about this, I highly recommend reading it.

Don’t eat anything artificial. This includes anything with artificial colors, as consumption has been linked to ADHD, allergies, and cancer. This also includes MSG, or monosodium glutamate, a flavor additive that is added to many foods such as microwavable ramen noodles.

Don’t consume bad oils. This is a tough one, but also essential. Bad oils are most often found in fatty, greasy foods such as fries, hamburgers, and pizza. The worst oils for health are: canola oil, soybean oil, vegetable oil, and cottonseed oil. Buy foods with olive, coconut, sesame, sunflower, sesame, and rice bran oils instead. Coconut oil is especially healthy and a great cooking oil.

My father has dedicated his life to improving people’s health, and I have been lucky enough to have an extremely healthy diet my entire life. I rarely ever get sick, and if I do, my immune system, strong from my healthy diet, drastically shortens the recovery time.

I know many people who eat healthy on and off. This is not the right way to go. In the short term, everything seems fine because they might not have an immediate negative health reaction to the food. That’s why unhealthy food is so dangerous. Every time you eat unhealthy foods, your body becomes more and more toxic and prone to sickness. After years and years, the accumulated toxicity will have built up so much that it usually results in heart disease, cancer, obesity, and countless other diseases that are so prevalent in western culture.

It’s not always convenient to eat healthy all the time, because there are so many unhealthy ingredients in most American foods. Because of this, it’s essential to eat healthy whenever possible, because just living in western culture it’s guaranteed that there are a ridiculous amount of bad ingredients in our food. No matter how hard we try to eat well, we will inevitably end up eating some things that are bad for us.

Since healthy foods are more expensive than unhealthy foods, you might think that it is cheaper to eat from McDonald’s instead of a health food store right? Well, that’s actually not true at all. In the short run, even over the course of years or decades, it might be cheaper, but in the long run, all the medical bills you will end up paying for some major health issue as a result of a lifetime of accumulated toxicity and bad health will radically outweigh the minor added cost of eating healthy.

Health problems, when not genetic or environmental, are largely a result of our diets. Start eating a healthy diet, and watch many of your chronic health problems go away. You will be very surprised at how well this works.

After fully cleansing your built-up toxicity from unhealthy foods and overcoming your addictions to sugar, salt, unhealthy fats, etc and transitioning to a fully healthy diet, your body will start to adapt to the new diet and give you more energy, a clearer mind, and countless other benefits that you have to experience yourself. Another effect of this adaptation is that since you have cleansed your body, you will become sensitive to unhealthy foods. For example, I ate at KFC with some friends a few months ago and after the meal, I felt terrible. I felt sick to my stomach and very low-energy. The same thing happened when I went to Burger King a couple of months later.

A great thing about choosing to eat healthy is that you not only affect yourself and the people you’re around but you also affect the food system itself. You could call it voting with your wallet. In recent years, people have become more health conscious, and you can probably see that there are many more healthy options on menus and in places where they had not been even a few years ago. Buy healthy foods and those good companies will become more profitable and expand, while unhealthy food vendors lose the potential money you could have spent on their food.

You really should treat your body as a temple and only feed it healthy, nutritious foods. If you think about it, all of your physical body is made up of food and drinks that you’ve consumed. Trust me, you will not regret shifting to a healthy diet. The hardest part of this shift is overcoming the addictive urges to eat unhealthy foods, and overcoming that will radically boost your self-discipline, which is an essential trait to have a lot of.

Your health is the basis for the quality of your life, and should be treated with just as much priority and importance. Once you make the life-changing transition from unhealthy to healthy food, you will never, ever regret it. Spread the word by sharing this article with your friends and family, you never know whose life you could change!

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