First off, we know now that, if you’re eating right, the amount of calories you consume doesn’t matter. This is a very controversial and revolutionary idea that has only recently gained acceptance through newly-published works such as “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. This Ebook describes the phenomenon as well as laying out in significantly more detail the dietary measures that will keep you healthy no matter how many calories you consume.
Now that we know that it’s the proportion of food we’re shooting for and not some arbitrary number of calories to eat that’s important, the pyramid itself: The “bottom”, foundation-layer of a healthy diet is vegetables. Vegetables are high in water, vitamins, and nutrients. In order to benefit from eating vegetables, it’s important to eat several different kinds of vegetables across the day.
Be aware, however, that many things we consider vegetables are not in this category. Corn, for example, is a starch, as are peas and potatoes of all varieties. The simple measure is this: if you can make a chip out of it (corn chips, potato chips, taro chips, etc.), it’s a starch. Avocadoes are a fat, but fortunately are the only vegetable I know of that fits in this category. No rule to memorize there.
The next layer is meat. Not beans, not nuts -- real, animal meat. Vegetarians may not like this, but it's nearly impossible to get a complete set of essential amino acids and essential fatty acids from plant matter. Humans can survive entirely on a diet of meat -- Eskimos and Bantu tribesman have been doing it for thousands of years without a trace of heart disease, cancer, or other common American maladies -- but it's a lot easier to get proper nutrition when you eat lots of veggies, too.
(If you insist on a vegan diet, you can get something close to a complete essentials-profile by eating from both the “nuts” family (not including peanuts) and the “legume” family (which oddly does include peanuts as well as beans and other legumes) at the same time. If you don’t mix them in your stomach, there’s a significantly lower chance of the proteins recombining to form the essential acids that you need. Also, you’ll need to eat a significant portion of either chia seed or kiwifruit. There are a few essential fatty acids that don’t exist at all in plants – but fortunately, your body can recombine one other fatty acid to generate the one that you wouldn’t otherwise get. That one fatty acid is found in small amounts in soy and flax (both of which you should avoid for other reasons), and in large amounts in kiwifruit and chia seed. Keep in mind that there are several other good reasons to avoid a vegan diet, including zinc loss and copper toxicity that I don’t have time or space to go into here.)
Next up is fruit. Fruits should be your primary source of carbohydrates, and even then, too many carbs can have long-term health problems including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and more. Fruits, like veggies, are high in water, vitamins, and minerals, and thus getting a wide variety of them is important. Don’t stock up too much on just one kind of fruit!
On the same level, we have dairy. Cheese, milk, yogurt, whatever -- just don't drink milk that isn't whole. Here's why: the FDA doesn't have rules about what goes into non-whole milk. Companies can seriously add any substance that makes their product look, smell, taste, or feel more like milk, and they don't have to tell you about it. If you don't control what you consume, you can't ever expect to control your long-term health. If at all possible, drink old-school, RAW milk. Milk has enzymes in it that help your body digest it – even if you’re lactose intolerant – and pasteurization and homogenization break those enzymes, as well as the naturally-occurring vitamin D in milk, down. They add Vitamin D back in, but the stuff they add is synthesized, and has none of the cofactors that actually help you uptake the vitamin, so it’s largely excreted.
Take that as an object lesson: the closer to a food’s natural context you eat it in, the more your body will get out of it.
Fat is the next category. Most of your fat will come in your meat and dairy, but this special extra section is for those fats that you need above and beyond your incidental fat intake in order to make sure that you're getting a complete Essential Fatty Acid profile. Make sure that you get some Omega-3 fatty acids and some Omega-6 fatty acids. These come from oils such as olive oil, butter, expeller-pressed nut oils (almond, peanut, etc.), fish oils, and expeller-pressed seed oils (NOT Canola oil, but other seed oils like linseed and flaxseed).
As an aside, avoid low-fat, reduced-fat, and fat-free foods. All of these products lose their context and have it replaced by artificial additions in order to keep roughly the same flavor.
Finally, as the smallest line, we have starches. Not bread, pancakes, Swiss Rolls, or biscuits and gravy -- flour kills just as much as sugar does. They’re both overprocessed, context-less foods that literally leech vitamins and minerals out of your body and cause you to excrete them.
Starches means whole foods, like potatoes, corn on the cob, wild rice, quinoa, bulgar wheat, and the like. If you love bread, get the sprouted-grain, flourless bread. White rice also leeches vitamins from your muscles, so avoid it.
Zero servings of starch is normal for me -- it's not necessary at all. If you paid attention above, you’d notice that there are Essential Fatty Acids (fat) and Essential Amino Acids (protein), but no such thing as an Essential Carbohydrate. That’s because your body is perfectly capable of creating every carbohydrate that it needs without you needing to consume any. But if you want it, you can totally have a serving each day without damaging your long-term health, as long as it’s not flour-based.
Speaking of sugar, notice that it doesn't appear on the corrected Healthy Eating Pyramid. Sugar is the “Prime Cause” of our nation's obesity epidemic, as well as the flood of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and more that we've experienced in the last few decades. Sugar is horribly addictive -- some studies have compared it to heroin or cocaine in difficulty to break the addiction to -- and it literally sucks vital nutrients and vitamins out of your body while it packs the fat onto every square inch of your body.
That said, sugar is irreplaceable in some recipes, and I understand that. If you are going to use sugar (and I admit that I do occasionally, too!), try to get ahold of sugar in it’s most unprocessed, natural form possible. In my experience, the best place is at an Oriental food store – in the form of “palm sugar” or “coconut sugar”. This is literally stuff that they let leak from a stabbed tree, boiled down until it was solid, and shipped to your community ethnic store to sell. It’s the best context you’ll ever find in sugar. Even then, use it in moderation – just enough to give the flavor you need to make a dish right.
If you need help, or want more information, How to Eat Food will answer any question you may have.
Follow these rules, get the corrected Healthy Eating Pyramid up in your house, and – while it might take a month for you to get there – I guarantee you will feel the difference every morning.
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