Not long ago, I received an email from a reader who told me, “my doctor told me to improve my nutrition, but I don’t know how.” Well, clearly, the doctor didn’t know how either because she didn’t give my reader any advice or direction!
Don’t be surprised. According to a 2010 report from Academic Medicine, doctors get less than 20 hours of nutrition education throughout all their years in medical school. Yet another 2018 report from the American Journal of Medicine indicates that 67% of physicians read about nutrition less than once every three months.
Today, I will tell you what good nutrition and healthy eating actuall mean and how you can move towards both.
What is Good Nutrition?
I think french fries, cupcakes, and Raisinettes should be major food groups. I say that (half) jokingly, of course, but I really do like that stuff.
Good nutrition is the right food in the right balance to keep your body functioning optimally. When doctors urge their patients to improve their nutrition, they are suggesting to those patients that they eat less of those things like fries and cupcakes and more of these kinds of things:
Eat Mostly Whole, Less Processed Foods
Processed foods have gone through a manufacturing process (canned, frozen, pre-cooked, or packaged) or have been fortified with nutrients and preservatives. When you hear that, you might think that nearly everything has been processed in some way. And you would be right. We aren’t hunter-gatherer tribes surviving on what we can catch. We’re modern humans who get our food from a store or from someone who grows or prepares it. Where processing crosses the line is at that point when you can no longer readily identify the list of ingredients on the label.
Heavily processed foods break down differently from unprocessed foods, and your body absorbs more calories as a result, which it stores as fat. Conversely, your body absorbs fewer calories in unprocessed food because it burns those more readily for energy, which ultimately is better for you.
Eating more whole foods such as fruits and vegetables, whole grains, beans and legumes, lean proteins, nuts and seeds, and other healthy fats makes it easier to regulate appetite and improve satiety.
Eat More Fruits and Vegetables
Your body needs vitamins and minerals to function optimally, and you can get those from a wide assortment of fruits and vegetables.
The carbohydrates in fruits and vegetables are used and stored more efficiently than carbohydrates you get from pasta, bread, donuts, cookies, or the other sweets that come to mind when we think of carbs. Fruits and vegetables contain fiber, which helps move cholesterol out of the body. Not only that but fruits and vegetables provide a lot of volume for minimal calories. What this means is that they keep you fuller, longer.
Fruits and vegetables help to promote healthy digestion. That’s good news if you suffer from digestive health issues such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), irregular bowel movements, heartburn, and other maladies.
Eat Lower-Fat or Fat-Free Foods
Our bodies need some dietary fat to function. Unfortunately, overindulging in fatty foods is easy to do because food makers spend billions of dollars in labs to make food that’s hyper-palatable—meaning it hits all the right tastebuds in your mouth and immediately tells your brain that more is better! When a TV ad says, “you can’t eat just one,” you’d better believe it.
Fat is nutrient-dense. To put it in perspective, one gram of fat contains nine calories, but one gram of carbohydrate and protein has four calories. So, it doesn’t take long to rack up the calories when indulging in fat-laden foods.
Because fat contains so many calories, you might think it’s a good fuel source for your body. In truth, your body can and does use fat for fuel, but because fat is much harder to break down in our body, it’s slower to generate the energy we need. In the end, any fat that doesn’t get used for fuel gets stored. And you know what that means.
Besides getting stored in our adipose—or fat—tissue, excess dietary fat is also stored in the liver. According to a 2018 study published by the National Institute of Health, this can lead to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Serious cases of NAFLD can become aggressive with the potential to lead to cirrhosis.
You can still get great flavor out of your favorite foods by switching to lower-fat or fat-free foods. But a word of caution: Read the labels of fat-free foods carefully. Food makers often add extra sugar to fat-free foods to make them more appealing to your tastebuds.
Eat More Healthy Grains
Healthy grains are things like barley, brown rice, and oatmeal, to name a few. These healthy grains contain fiber, which keeps you fuller longer and helps to move cholesterol out of the body. Foods made of highly processed grain, such as white bread or pasta, provide carbs without much fiber. If you want to eat bread and pasta, look for those that use whole grains or whole wheat in their ingredients. We will review how to read nutrition labels later in this guide.
Lower Your Sugar Intake
Consumed in moderation, sugar will not have a debilitating effect on your overall health. However, when you consistently consume excess sugar, you expose your body to numerous health risks, such as:
- Increased risk of diabetes
- Chronic Inflammation
- Heart disease
- High blood pressure
- Depression
All of these conditions can dramatically affect your overall health. Diabetes can affect your circulatory system and your kidneys. Heart disease is life-threatening, and high blood pressure increases your risk of stroke. Chronic inflammation brings on its own subset of health problems. It can lead to lasting tissue damage and internal scarring in your digestive system, joints, heart, and blood vessels. Here, as with fat-free foods, you need to read ingredients carefully. Sugar—especially high-fructose corn syrup—is often used as a preservative in bread and other foods. Always check to see if the food you’re buying has added sugars, which will be listed on the nutrition label.
Drink Much Fewer Sugary Drinks with No Nutritional Value
The same reasoning prevails here as with reducing sugar intake. It’s best to eat your calories instead of drinking them to get more nutrients and stay fuller. Soft drinks, fruit juices, and other sweetened beverages—even those that bill themselves as “low sugar” can add sugar to your diet but no meaningful nutrition.
Eat Appropriate Portions
Portion sizes that you use are often distorted, and because of that, you may—sometimes unintentionally—eat way more than you should. Portion size directly equates to calorie consumption. Once you understand what an appropriate portion size is, you can figure out how to adjust the amount of food you put on your plate.
What is Healthy Eating?
Healthy eating combines good nutrition with your specific situation and influential factors: your biology (how your body works), your psychology (your mindset about food), and your social elements (what’s around you).
Biology: How Your Body Works
Your age, sex, and height, along with other physical and genetic factors, impact how your body uses the food that you consume. Some of these biological factors are things you can’t control!
As a contributing factor, some people have digestive, hormonal, immunity, metabolic, or physical issues or ailments that affect how they process the food they consume. For example, in the case of food allergies, there are some foods some people can’t tolerate at all. Allergic reactions can even generate a life-threatening situation.
In part, biology helps explain why that one friend of yours who is the same age, sex, and height as you can eat anything she wants and not gain a pound. But in your case, you might swear that you gain weight just by looking at food. Oh, the inhumanity!
Understanding how your own individual biology affects how and what you eat and how your body processes what you eat can help you work with your body (instead of fighting it). That’s an important key to healthy eating.
Psychology: Your Food Mindset
There is an undeniable psychological element to food and eating. How many times have you plowed through a bag of chips and then struggled to remember eating the first one?
So, when we talk about food mindset as a component of healthy eating, we’re talking about:
- Becoming more aware of what you’re eating
- Paying attention to how your food feels (taste, texture) when you eat
- Paying attention to your body and eating only until you’re about 80 percent full
- Knowing why you eat (stress, boredom, anxiety)
Understanding your food mindset isn’t a one and done process. It takes time to build awareness of your psychological triggers surrounding food. The good news is it is a skill that can be practiced. Be patient with yourself. But practice.
Social Elements: Who and What’s Around You
Around the world, in countless cultures, sharing a meal connects family and friends. It’s no different in our American culture. We gather around the table to celebrate birthdays and holidays or just to hang out and eat. Eating itself becomes an event.
Nevertheless, cultural differences in how people dine vary greatly. In some countries, it’s considered rude to clear your plate, while in others, it’s expected. Some cultures avoid certain foods altogether as part of their religious beliefs or prohibit them at specific times.
Another important social element that influences healthy eating is peer pressure. “Just have one” or “Just taste this” are remarks that might sound familiar to you.
Learning to adapt and to develop strategies to compensate for any of these social elements and others is a key part of healthy eating and good nutrition.
Why Good Nutrition and Healthy Eating Matter
Now that you know a little more about what I mean by good nutrition and healthy eating, you might be asking whether it matters. After all, scientific studies seem to contradict themselves daily. Eating eggs is bad. Eating eggs is good. Cheese, bad—no, cheese good.
Think of it this way. Imagine you have just purchased the car of your dreams. You make sure it’s regularly serviced, only use premium gas, and clean the inside and outside. You avoid aggressive driving and park so that your doors don’t get dinged. You have it waxed every few months. When it comes time to sell or upgrade, it’s in pristine condition, and you get more value from it.
Your body is a complex machine. How you fuel your body and how much exercise you get all have an impact over time, like how your car is affected by how you care for it. You can’t fuel your car with premium gas once and expect that it will run optimally. And you can’t eat one apple and hope that your body will stay healthy forever.
Final Words
Healthy eating and good nutrition have compounding effects over time. The more you practice both, the better positioned you are to thrive in your own body, increasing your mobility, longevity, and independence.