Here are five rules to a healthy diet.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. And this is
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're going to boil down
a healthy diet to five simple rules.
Rule #1: Protein. Get a half gram to a
gram of protein per pound of bodyweight,
or if you're trying to gain muscle or
lose fat, per pound of target bodyweight,
or if you measure your weight in
kilograms, double that amount. And this is
the important point.
Diversify among meat, fish, shellfish,
and other invertebrates, such as insects
if you eat them, eggs, and dairy products.
The reason for the diversification is
that each of these different types of
foods within the larger group of protein
foods has a different composition of
vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids, so you
want to diversify to get all the
different benefits from the different
foods, and because every food has
something in it that can be harmful if
consumed to excess, and you want to
avoid the potential accumulation of any
of those harmful things. Some people for
specific athletic or body composition
goals may need to eat even more protein
than that, but a half gram to a gram per
pound of bodyweight is sufficient for
most people to be healthy in my opinion.
Rule #2: Eat nose-to-tail. In other words,
try to consume the parts of
the animal, when you eat animals, that we
don't consume anymore but our ancestors
always consumed. A good way to start is
to try eating liver once or twice a week
and to try working in bones into your
diet whether through the edible bones
found in canned fish or the small—you
can gnaw off the ends of chicken bones,
for example, when they're small.
Or if you want something a little bit more
culinarily acceptable, bones are great to
boil down into stock that can be used
for gravies and broths. There are lots of
other ways to work in eating
nose-to-tail. There are plenty of other
organ meats, for example, that you can
start working in, but liver is the most
important thing to try to get in there
once a week for the nutritional benefits.
Rule #3: Get 1,000 milligrams
of calcium or up to 1.5 grams
of calcium per day. The easiest way to do
this is to get three servings of dairy products
or three servings of edible bones.
Bone broth is not included because
the liquids derived from bones are not
very rich in calcium. Edible bones or
dairy products or mixed and matched
between those two for three servings a day.
If you're not consuming either of
those two foods, you probably need to pay
closer attention to your calcium, and
there's probably a good likelihood that
you should take a calcium supplement.
Rule #4: Diversify your
carbohydrates among whole grains, legumes,
starchy tubers, and fruits. If you're
going to cut one of those out, you can cut
out whole grains. Try to get the others.
But if you don't have a specific reason
to avoid grains, then whole grains can be
a healthy part of your carbohydrate supply.
The reason for diversification in
the carbohydrates is exactly the same as
we talked about with the meats.
Rule #5: Eat a large volume, meaning
several cups a day, of vegetables.
Diversify across the color spectrum. Make
sure at least one of those cups of
vegetables is dark green. Again,
diversifying for the same reasons we
talked about before,
spread out the different types of
benefits, avoid too much risk in any
given one type of food. These are the
five rules. I'll add a bonus rule. Always
include digestive aids in your meals.
This could be things like including
ginger, or Swedish bitters, or fermented foods as
long as you tolerate them, lacto-fermented
foods, like sauerkraut and kimchi,
small amounts of kombucha,
different foods like this, maybe if you
need them, digestive enzyme supplements,
can all be important to making sure that
you get the nutrients out of your foods
because your diet is only as good as
your digestion of that diet. You can get
all the nutrients in the world into your
stomach, but if you're not pulling them
out and assimilating them into your body,
it doesn't do you any good.
These are rules for people who don't
have food allergies and food
intolerances that prevent them from
consuming some of the specific foods or
some of the food groups in this list.
You may be someone who needs to avoid
some of the foods that I talked about, and
that's okay, but the more foods you avoid,
the more you need to pay attention to
your diet to make sure you're managing
it properly. The broader spectrum of
foods within what I discussed here today
that you can consume, the more likely you
are to get everything you need without
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
of chrismasterjohnphd.com. This has been
Chris Masterjohn Lite, and I