Our simple understanding of healthy eating gets tested all the time by food, diet and supplement marketing that keep us darting here and there, chasing this fad or that trend. The long-term effect: Food Anxiety. It never feels like we’re doing enough so it’s hard to just relax and enjoy a simple meal of real, whole foods. What’s the answer?

The Meat and Kimchi Diet

The latest fad diet has arrived: Grass-fed meat with lots of fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi, and no alcohol or sugar.

The diet was developed by Dr. Sean O’Mara for his high-profile patients, including JD Vance, RFK, Jr., and Howard Lutnick, according to last week’s article, “Everyone in Trump’s Cabinet Is Eating Sauerkraut.” (1)

How long do you think this diet will last? Not long, I’m guessing, because how many people will stay on this kind of regimen morning, noon and night, seven days a week–even if they do benefit from “slimming waistlines and glowing skin?”

The Holy Grails of the Diet World

If you’ve lived more than a decade you know that we’ve been here before: Finally, the holy grail of health has been discovered–until we tire of it and clamor for a new one!

Last month, I wrote “Vitamin Frenzy” about how supplements, another “holy grail of health,” are the object of the same sort of fascination. Just last week, in fact, it was reported that “American businesses are racing—and taking risks–to get in on the craze” around peptides, the latest supplement fad.(2) The “peptide holy grail” promises nothing less than youth, beauty and strength for consumers.

Simple and Steady–the Food Anxiety Answer

While these stories are interesting and even a little amusing, I’m not sharing them for just informational or entertainment purposes. Rather, they are meant to illustrate the importance of Keeping It Simple and Staying Steady. That’s the answer to the Food Anxiety whipped up by modern food, diet and supplement marketing.

Eating well just isn’t supposed to be so hard that we need expensive doctors and supplements to enjoy good health. Nature has given every creature on the planet a perfect diet. You don’t see bears, giraffes, worms and whales consulting diet and nutrition books or checking out longevity supplements. They eat what Nature has provided in their environment.

 

Why would Nature have made things any different or more difficult for human creatures? In fact, Nature did not erect any uniquely pesky eating impediments for us. We simply need to eat the real whole foods Nature has given us and, importantly, only those foods.

Three Easy Guidelines for Healthy Eating

1. Stick to meals–rather than snacking or grazing which generally land us in ultra-processed food territory.

2. Sit down to eat because that amps up satisfaction

3. At every meal, STOP and OBSERVE. Look at your plate:

• Is everything something Nature provides from the earth rather than products from manufacturing facilities, e.g. vegetables, fruits, whole grains (not white stuff), meats, beans, nuts, seeds and good fats?
• Is there a good variety of those real, whole foods on your plate?
• Do vegetables and some fruit fill roughly half of your plate?

No Flash, No Glamour

That’s it, that’s all. Notice that nothing requires making big fancy or complicated dishes. Something as simple as hamburger, green beans, tomato slices and a potato is just fine. I have those kinds of meals all the time!

Boring, right? Not at all glamorous or hip?

Feeding ourselves was never meant to be a fashion statement or status indicator. It is a sacred act of gifting our bodies with the amazing nourishment Nature has bestowed upon us. Don’t let the diet industry convince you to spend $8000 to $18,000 to have a doctor put you on a diet of sauerkraut and grass-fed meat!

Kind of like the tortoise and the hare story: Simple and steady wins the race.

More Stories–Making Healthy Eating Simple

Peggy Just this week I was chatting with a friend. She and her husband are dealing with some health issues, she explained, so she did a little research around health-supporting ways to eat. She was surprised by what she found: “Mary,” she exclaimed, “healthy eating is just the way we always ate!”

Yes, that’s the well-guarded secret of the diet world. Eating well isn’t a mystery. It’s quite simple–and exactly the way we ate when Peggy and I were growing up in the 50s, 60s and 70s, before processed foods, diets and supplements invaded the food world and absorbed our attention.

Mary (Me!) I am not immune to the allure of fad diets and alarming health messages. In my early 30s I did the 2-week no-carb diet, but quickly learned the dirty secret about diets. Within a couple weeks, the five pounds I lost came right back on!

I also remember hearing a news spot in my early 40s raising the alarm over the lack of fiber in our diets. Over the next two days I drove myself to distraction worrying about and trying to calculate my fiber intake!

As I wrote in “A Micromanagement Nightmare,” how in the world, each day, are we supposed to keep track of, buy, prepare and eat all the different foods needed for the proper functioning of the body, not just for fiber but for the dozens of other vital nutrients from nitric oxide to arginine—not to mention a slew of vitamins and minerals?

The answer: We’re not supposed to track all that! Nature has given us a tremendous bounty of foods, exactly because we need a big bundle of different nutrients. So all we have to do is eat a wildly diverse diet–seasonal is best–and the bases are covered without any brain damage.

Eating Magic?

People often ask what I eat, maybe thinking I have some special eating formula. In fact, I don’t do anything special and am pretty boring. I eat everything that I’m not allergic to (although I do go easy on grain products.)

Sure, I sometimes wonder, “Am I’m doing enough?” “Am I missing something?” Should I be trying the latest “it” food or “longevity diet?”

That’s when I remember that slow and steady wins the race. I just keep following the same, real and whole food diet I’ve been following for 35 years. Admittedly, however, writing about the latest fermented diet fad did prompt me to pull out my fermented pickles and enjoy a couple!

The hard part, as always, is making health-supporting meals three times a day, day in and day out. And that is where the Magic of Meal Making Transformation comes in! Find out more here.