This book describes the diet to end all diets.
That’s easy to say, of course. All kinds of nutrition books claim to describe the one and only, best-of-all diet—the last one you’ll ever need. The truth is, there really are a lot of good diets out there. You’re already familiar with some of them: the Okinawan, the Mediterranean, and the French—who, paradoxically, live long, healthy lives though their foods are so heavy and rich.
As a physician, I’ve often wondered—as have many of my patients—what it is, exactly, that makes all these good diets so special. If the people in Japan, eating lots of fish and fresh vegetables, and the people of the Mediterranean, eating dairy and foods drenched in olive oil, can enjoy superior health, and attribute their good health to the foods they eat, then how is it that—enjoying apparently different foods—they can both lay claim to the number-one, best diet on earth? Could it be that many cultures hold equal claim to a fantastically successful nutritional program? Might it be that people all over the world are doing things right, acquiring the nutrients their bodies need to stay healthy and feel young by eating what appear to be different foods but which are, in reality, nutritionally equivalent?
This book comprehensively describes what I like to call the Human Diet. It is the first to identify and describe the commonalities between all the most successful nutritional programs people the world over have depended on for millennia to protect their health. The Human Diet also encourages the birth of healthy children so that the heritage of optimum health can be gifted to the next generation, and the generations that follow.
We like to talk about leaving a sustainable, healthy environment for our children. The latest science fuses the environmental discussion with the genetic one; when we talk environmental sustainability, we are necessarily talking about our genomic sustainability.
This is also the first book to discuss health across generations. Because of a new science called epigenetics, it will no longer make sense to consider our health purely on the personal level. When we think of our health, we think of our own bodies, as in “I feel good,” “I like my weight,” “I’m doing fine.” Epigenetics is teaching us that our genes can be healthy or sick, just like we can. And if our genes are healthy when we have children, that health is imparted to them. If our genes are ailing, then that illness can be inherited as well. Because epigenetics allows us to consider health in the context of a longer timeline, we are now able to understand how what we eat as parents can change everything about our children, even the way they look. We’ll talk about how, with the right foods, we can get our genomes into shape to give our kids a fighting chance.
Each chapter is chock full of scientific revelations you can use to take positive action toward better health. If you have digestive system problems, you will learn how to act as a gardener of your intestinal flora to better protect yourself against pathogenic infections. If you’re fighting cancer, you’ll learn that sugar is cancer’s favorite food and how cutting sugar helps you start to starve it out. If you suffer from recurring migraines, frequent fatigue, irritability, or concentration problems, you will learn how eliminating toxic oils and adding more fresh greens into your diet can free you from these syndromes.
One of the most important new concepts of Deep Nutrition is the idea that the foods parents eat can change the way their future children look. Actually, it’s not entirely new. Most of us are familiar with fetal alcohol syndrome, a developmental impairment characterized by a set of facial abnormalities caused by alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Those very same developmental impairments can be caused by malnutrition during pregnancy or early childhood. I see this every day in my clinic. On the pages here, I’ll explain why following the standard dietary recommendations currently promoted by nutritionists and dietitians means running the risk that your child’s development will be similarly affected. To protect your children from these potentially life-altering problems, I provide a game plan to help ensure mom’s body is adequately fortified with all the nutritional supplies a growing baby requires—something I call the sibling strategy.
There’s been a reluctance to equate good looks with good health—even, for that matter, to broach the subject. But with the healthcare infrastructure creaking under the bloat of chronically ill children and adults, it’s time to get real. We’re not talking about abstract aesthetic concepts of beauty. If you’re planning on having children, and you want them to have every opportunity in life, you want them to be healthy and physically attractive. How do we know what’s attractive? We met with the world’s leading expert in the science of beauty to find out for ourselves what, exactly, makes a person pretty or plain. His name is Dr. Stephen Marquardt. He’s a highly sought-after plastic surgeon living outside Los Angeles, and his “Marquardt Mask” shows how the perfect human face is the inevitable result of a person’s body growing in accordance with the mathematical rules of nature.
You’re going to meet another maverick, a man who should be considered the father of modern nutrition. Like Marquardt, a plastic surgeon, this modest dentist refused to accept the idea that it was natural for children’s teeth to crowd and shift as haphazardly as tombstones on frost-heaved ground. Teeth should fit, he insisted. He traveled the world to determine if living on traditional foods would ensure the proper growth of children so that their teeth, their eyes, and every organ in their bodies would match one another in perfect proportion, ensuring optimum function and extraordinary health. He discovered that human health depends on traditional foods. proves that this is so because our genes expect the nutrients traditional foods provide.
The most important single idea you’re going to come away with is that there is an underlying order to our health. Sickness isn’t random. We get sick when our genes don’t get something they expect, one too many times. No matter your age, meeting these genetic expectations will improve your health dramatically. This is why we’ve devoted the bulk of the plan section of the book to describing what, exactly, your genes expect you to eat: the Four Pillars of the Human Diet. These foods will unlock your genetic potential, literally rebuilding your body one molecule at a time as fast as you can feed it. Of course, this doesn’t all happen overnight. The longer you continue to provide your body rejuvenating nutrition, the more benefits you will enjoy.
The first thing you will notice is more mental energy—usually within the first few days. As I tell my patients who elect to embark on this healing journey, the real you is obscured behind layers of cognitive static. Like a cell phone signal flickering in and out, the communication between regions of your mind is partially blocked. You don’t even know who you really are until your mind is fully operational.
But before you can discover that potential, it is essential that you learn to recognize two toxic substances present in our food that are incompatible with normal genetic function: sugars and vegetable oils. These are not just toxic to people who have food sensitivities or certain medical conditions like leaky gut or prediabetes. They’re toxic to every living thing. By eliminating vegetable oil and reducing foods that raise blood sugar, you will make caloric space to accommodate the nutrition your body craves.
When you have finished reading this book, you will have completely revised the way you think about food. We’re going to put calorie counting and struggling to find the perfect ratio of carbs to protein to fat on the back burner. These exercises don’t reveal what really matters about your food. Food is like a language, an unbroken information stream that connects every cell in your body to an aspect of the natural world. The better the source and the more undamaged the message when it arrives to your cells, the better your health will be. If you eat a properly cooked steak from an open-range, grass-fed cow, then you are receiving information not only about the health of that cow’s body, but also about the health of the grasses from which she ate, and the soil from which those grasses grew. If you want to know whether or not a steak or a fish or a carrot is good for you, ask yourself what portions of the natural world it represents, and whether or not the bulk of that information remains intact. This requires traveling backward down the food chain, step by step, until you reach the ground or the sea.
In the following chapters, you will learn that the secret to health—the big secret, the one no one’s talking about—is that there is no secret. Getting healthy, really healthy, and staying healthy can be easy. Avoiding cancer and dependence on medications, staving off heart disease, keeping a razor-sharp mind well into advanced years, and even having healthy, beautiful children are all aspects of the human experience that can be, and should be, under your control. You can live better, and it doesn’t have to be that difficult. You just have to be armed with the right information.
No matter what you already believe about diet, medicine, or health—including the limits of your own health—the book you’re about to read will enable you to make better sense of what you already know. To answer what is for many people a nagging question: Who’s right? What’s the simple, complete picture that ties all the best information together, so that I can know, once and for all, which foods my family is supposed to eat and which ones we need to avoid? How can I be sure that what I’m preparing for my children will give them a better chance to grow normally, succeed in school, and live long, happy lives?
What am I supposed to make for dinner?
This book will give you the answer.