Now that you understand the five major defense systems and that certain foods can support their function, this chapter will provide the tools to make eating healthy a way of life. You’ll get a comprehensive food list, specific strategies, and two full weeks of meal plans to provide structure and support.
Mindful Eating Every Day
Every time you eat, you make decisions that affect your health and can protect you from disease. Dr. Li developed a 5x5x5 plan, which is his easy way to get you to eat at least one food per day that supports each of the five defense systems. This plan is based on supporting the five defense systems by including at least five foods from the chart in meals and snacks, up to five times per day. It’s about having a constant rotation of health-promoting foods you enjoy woven into your daily life.
You’ll notice that most recipes have a wide variety of foods that support the five defense systems, so eating this way is a delicious and simple way to access many nutrients and health-boosting compounds. It is not meant to be prescriptive or restrictive but to open your horizons, showing you how many
great-tasting options support your health goals.
As a registered dietitian, I want you to love food and have a good relationship with it. You can pick out the foods you enjoy and adjust recipes as appropriate for your dietary preferences and needs while using them and the structure provided here to create a long-term plan for you and your family.
SNACK SMART
The research on whether it’s better to eat three square meals per day or smaller meals and more snacks is mixed (Hess, Jonnalagadda, and Slavin 2016). The best way to know what works for you is to listen to your personal hunger cues and assess your energy throughout the day. If you do choose to include a snack once or more per day, you have a lot of options to maximize health-promoting foods. There’s no need to feel guilty about snacking; instead, use the snack suggestions in the meal plans in this chapter (
here
and
here
) or the recipes in
chapter 8
to choose foods that have been shown to support the body’s natural defense systems.
COOKING WITH PURPOSE
In the chapters that follow, you’ll find 75 recipes, each of which contains at least two ingredients that have health-boosting and disease-fighting properties that fit into the Eat to Beat Disease
concept. The recipes here do not include red meat (including pork, beef, etc.), because red meat doesn’t often show up in the research or dietary patterns that appear to reduce the risk of chronic disease.
Use the food list to pick the foods you enjoy (no need to use them all), weaving them into meals that you already enjoy. You can pick the options that suit your tastes, are easy to find at your
local markets, and fit within your budget.
Do No Harm
There are foods out there that do interfere with good health and are incompatible with a dietary pattern that’s focused on preventing chronic disease. Regularly consuming foods like sugar-sweetened beverages, red meat (beef, lamb, pork), and processed meat (bacon, sausage, deli meat, hot dogs) has been shown consistently, across large studies, to be associated with increased risk of chronic diseases, including coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, and stroke (Clark et al. 2019).
Saturated fat:
Whether it’s from high-fat dairy, meat, or even coconut oil, the current recommendations are to limit your intake of saturated fat to just 5% to 6% of your total calories. On a 2,000-calorie diet, that’s about 13 grams per day. There are 4 grams in a teaspoon of butter or coconut oil.
Red and processed meat:
Though the results of studies are mixed and the strength of the association between red and processed meat intake and increased risk of cancer, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease is still being assessed, it is clear that dietary patterns that include these foods regularly (i.e., the standard Western diet) do not protect against diseases as effectively as plant-based dietary patterns, such as vegetarian, vegan, and Mediterranean diets (Händel et al. 2019; Schwingshackl et al. 2016; Melina, Craig, and Levin 2016).
Added sugar and artificial sweeteners:
The guidelines on added sugar are clear—limit it to no more than 10% of your daily calories (200 calories or 12 teaspoons on a 2,000-calorie diet). According to the American Heart Association, Americans consume, on average, nearly 80 grams per day. An unprocessed, whole-food diet is naturally devoid of added sugars and sugar substitutes that are highly processed and do not contain beneficial fiber and
antioxidants.
Excessive salt:
An estimated 9 out of 10 Americans consume too much salt, and 70% of that comes directly from prepared, packaged, and restaurant foods. Eating too much salt is clearly linked in research to an increased risk of high blood pressure, which in turn can increase the risk of chronic diseases like heart attack, stroke, and heart failure. Reduce your salt intake to no more than 2,300 mg per day, and ideally no more than 1,500 mg per day, especially for adults with high blood pressure, which is easy to do if most of your foods are unprocessed.
Your Eat to Beat Disease Food List
This food list is organized alphabetically by food type. For each food, you can clearly see which defense systems it supports, so you can make the best choices for your individual goals and preferences.