Poor diet is a Rider of Apocalypse, part 2 *

So what is it that we should eat to have optimal energy and health? What are the necessary ingredients of a good diet?

As I mentioned in the previous post, the way to avoid fads and confusion generously served by modern media, is to turn to what has worked over the centuries to make human race so successful.

The Human Condition Theory says that in order to be healthy, we should do what humans did across races, across cultures and across time.

In terms of food, this means eating a big variety of whole (unprocessed) foods, grains, vegetables, fruit, seeds, nuts and animal protein. Water is the only thing all humans drunk over eons, juices, alcohol and caffeinated drinks were never on the majority's menu until modern times.

When it comes to animal protein, modern humans eat eat too much of it to a point where it became the main ingredient of our meals. Animal protein is necessary for our cell oppression but we need minimal amount of it. On the other hand, we really need it - not only did every culture and every race across time consume animal protein - there has never been a single culture that didn't. And there are human cultures that lived exclusively on meat...

Nowadays many people choose to limit or even completely avoid animal protein. Some claim ethical reasons to do so but there are still plenty of free range, ethically raised animals that can be used for human consumption.

Another common reason not to eat animals is because they may suffer or even anticipate being slaughtered but how do we know that plants can not suffer either? We also may be forgetting that every living thing eats other living things. Ethically or not, this is really how Nature works.

Going back to a healthy diet, we see that every culture, every race across time cooks their food. There isn't a single country (or culture overall) that has exclusively eaten raw, uncooked foods. Why is this? Why work so much harder to collect and maintain cooking equipment, gather fuel, spend extra time cooking foods?... It is because by mechanically processing (cutting and heating) our food we make it safer to consume and easier to digest.

There are different ways of cooking but looking at the benefits of cooking, steaming and stir frying stand above boiling, roasting and baking as methods that eliminate bacteria (that can not be washed off) while still keeping our food full of living ingredients. High temperature for a short amount of time makes more sense then exposing your food to 300 degrees for 20+ minutes - the later is likely to kill many of the benefits food should deliver.