What Is the Best Diet?
Is it the vegan diet? The ketogenic diet? The paleo diet? The carnivore diet?
All of these share a common thread. They all promote restriction, whether it is calories, food groups, and even going out to eat with friends. When I was fruitarian it was impossible for me to go out and meet people because I was on such an extreme diet. Don't be the person that brings their own food to a restaurant. That puts a barrier of connection between you and the person or people you're sharing a table with.
Health is more than what we eat. It is a lot more. Our environment, our community, our sense of purpose, our acting on our purpose, all contributes to a state of stress resilience or stress sensitivity. With stress present, every effort you make to bring your body back into balance will be for nothing. Exercise, cold showers, drinking coffee on an empty stomach, and skipping meals will only increase your stress until a major disease manifests. The main goal with our health is to lower stress.
Nature and simultaneously disconnecting from social media are excellent to reduce stress.
The body has basic nutritional requirements: carbohydrates, protein from animal sources, fats, vitamins and minerals. Protein (complexes of amino acids) are not just for muscle growth and recovery. Enzymes, the catalysts for chemical reactions, are proteins with an electrical charge. Our brain chemicals are made from protein. Protein is required to make stomach acid, to not only digest our food, but to ward off parasites and pathogens.
A vegan diet is inherently deficient in protein which will ultimately result in lowered digestive power from a hydrochloric acid deficiency. We can do our best to increase our consumption of bee bread (honey + bee pollen) or royal jelly, but how sustainable is that long term? I tried it myself and one day realized how much I am trying to change what already is.
The Creator put the animals here to feed us; that is very evident in the scriptures. There is a slippery reach-for-godhood mentality in those revolutionaries that think that they can side-step human physiology and physical reality. What dictates whether we eat meat or not is our spiritual beliefs. We are creators to a large degree but there is a big Creator whose power and plan supersedes our own. For those of us who have lived long enough, we know that our plans usually don't pan out exactly how we planned they would.
The phrase, "everybody is different", is used a lot. But besides our experiences, what about our bodies? Last time I checked, everyone has a: heart, liver, kidneys, thyroid (unless it was removed), adrenals, pancreas, eyes, brain and cells that run on glucose! The brain and eyes are the most dependent on glucose, so much so that in a deficient state, the body will prioritize those energy-demanding centers and slow down production in less essential areas. This can appear as symptoms in headaches or cold hands and feet which I had for many years.
We must live a lifestyle in accordance with what the body needs (carbs + protein with every meal) and eating more saturated than unsaturated fats. The body is designed to heal and every disease that we've created names for go away when the liver is not full of lipofuscin, our liver can store a sufficient amount of glycogen to power us through eight hours or more of sleep and the cells have sufficient thyroid hormone to produce energy. These are all areas that I will expand on in future articles.
To your vital health,
Matt Blackburn