You need more than vegetables if you look at your food as medicine. You also need good quality protein and healthy fats. A well-rounded diet includes lots of fruits and vegetables and meats and fats.
Meat & Fats Are Your Friends
Why You Need Meat (Protein, actually)
Your body needs a lot of protein, especially high-quality protein. But, protein is not just one molecule or just a piece of meat. It’s a combination of 22 different amino acids, eight of which we need to consume to live (the rest we can make ourselves). Fortunately, we can easily meet all our needs for these amino acids in whole cuts of high-quality meat.
How much do you actually need to eat? Not very much – only about 8 to 12 oz per day. One egg is 3oz! Unfortunately, most people eat too much, which causes liver and kidney problems.
Vegetarians and vegans have the opposite problem. If you don’t eat enough protein or get the right balance of protein, your body starts to eat its own muscle tissue. Unfortunately, soy, potato, pea, and vegetables do not have the right combination of proteins for you to survive on, and fake meats have such poor-quality protein the body doesn’t even recognize them as food.
Why You Need Fats
The same is true with fats. You need healthy fats to survive, more than proteins.
These healthy fats come from nuts, seeds, and animal products – olive, walnut, peanut, sesame, butter, and animal fats, among others. Focusing on high quality prevents rancidity and the natural production of trans-fats (canola and vegetable oils are rife with trans-fats and chemical bleaching).
We need a lot of healthy fats in our diet to produce hormones, build healthy tissue, and energy. Contrary to popular belief, eating fat does not make you fat. But, if you don’t have enough fats or follow a low-fat diet, you could be experiencing depression, weakness, and poor memory because your body can’t make dopamine and other necessary hormones.
Quality Over Quantity
You eliminate many bad things when you cut out processed foods from your diet. For example, it eliminates bad fats and unhealthy sources of proteins (like soy).
When the low-fat craze took over, processed food products turned to sugar and chemicals to replace the tasty fats. This encouraged things like diabetes, cancer, and mental health problems. Eliminating processed foods gives you natural, healthy fats and eliminates excess sugar and chemicals.
Choosing high-quality protein and fat is the key to being healthy. You get more healthy nutrition from an organic cut of meat than you do from a non-organic, large piece of meat. In addition, you can get better taste and fulfillment by eating less, which will help you lose weight.
In today’s economy, focusing on quality to get higher nutrition and satisfaction can make your budget last longer and make you healthier. Choosing food as medicine means you prevent problems before they start!
Photo credit: Big Stock Photo
