Beyond the Label: The Two Facts of Nutrition

Experts rarely agree on what exactly you should eat. But we've brought you two nutritional facts that go beyond the label, which everyone can agree on.

Below is a transcript you can use to follow the video with links to more information on the topic.

"With tens of thousands of nutritional articles and books available it is impossible to know which meal plan is the best meal plan.

Most experts don't even agree with each other on all of the details.

Some support vegan, some support paleo, some Mediterranean. There is even divide among similar supporters like just in the vegan world. To eat starches or to not eat starches?

So what should we do?

Well in his book Food Rules, Michael Pollen identified two nutrition facts that everyone agrees on.

Fact #1: Populations that eat a typical western diet consisting of “lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains aka white flour, lots of everything except vegetables, fruits and whole grains” suffer from the typical western diseases of obesity, type-2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Fact #2: Populations that do not eat that stuff, do not suffer from those chronic diseases. Their traditional diets vary tremendously. From the super high-fat diets of the Inuit in Greenland who eat mostly seal blubber, to the super high carbohydrate diets of the Central American Indians who eat a ton of maize and beans, to the super high protein diets of the Masai in Africa who eat mostly cattle meat, blood, and milk. But, even with that extreme variety, they do not suffer from the chronic diseases that we do in America.”

So if your eating habits are currently dominated by the Western Diet...could you not?

Science shows that getting off the western diet creates dramatic improvements in our health."