One NY times article stated: "Just eat food". As a general rule of thumb, they stated, if your great grandmother doesn't recognize it as food, it probably isn't.
The primary food groups are:
- Beans
- Whole Grains
- Fruits
- Vegetables
the two secondary groups are:
- Nuts
- Seeds
And, you can eat some oil and sugar, just make sure it's not a vast amount. Know that anything in a wrapper or box or plastic bag that was made in a factory is roughly 50% oil. With Sat Fat, gotta be much more careful because it takes very little to go over in that category.
People always wonder what's so special about these foods (beans, whole grains, fruits, vegies), why are they healthy? why can't we just eat cheeseburgers everyday. It's just that, the whole foods plant based diet is what our ancestors ate for millions of years. it's what our body has adapted to for millions of years.
When scientists followed the hazda tribe (an untouched people, who still mostly live the way our ancestors lived) through their native area, they found that they mainly just ate plants. they grazed all day long, going from bush to bush eating leafy green vegetables, the occassional fruits. Their 2 day meal plant consisted of grabbing whatever leafy greens they happened to find that day. Of course, they're expert foragers and know what to eat. It may not seem like a varied diet but, there are over 80,000 edible plant species in the world. You likely have over a dozen growing in your backyard if you know what they look like: Dandelions, Dock, american willoherb, holleycock, mallow, wood sorrel, miners lettuce, nasturiums, etc.
Simply put, the diet that most closely mimics the foods that humans evolved to eat, are the ones that cause the least amount of health issues.
If you don't like eating greens all day, here's another idea:
2 Meal day:
Breakfast: Cacao powder with hot water and 1 TSP of soymilk or oatmilk*
Lunch: Oatmeal, 2 mangos
Dinner: Cabbage soup: carrots, tomatoes, cabbage with spices and beans,
Steamed Broccoli. a piece of whole wheat bread, and for dessert: some high fiber cereal with a little bit of soymilk and honey on top. (Yum!)
breakfast: cacao powder with hot water and soymilk.
Lunch: Juiced greens from the garden (whatever's growing that's edible), an apple, pear, couple of almonds, Lentil soup
Dinner: Garden salad with nuts, brown rice, tofu and tomato dish
dessert: chia seed pudding with soymilk and cinnamon.
*(Oatmilk - this is another one of those alternative health foods to watch out for: alot of these things are filled with oil and sugar. they say 2% oil but that's by weight, not calories, so vastly misleading). check the ingredient labels. Soemtimes, You can reverse engineer the real ingredient breakdown by calculating the % of fat or sat fat listed on the label vs the % of fat found in rolled oats.
Most people don't have time to eat greens 10 hours a day like the hazda do, so we have to rely on Beans and Whole Grains, nuts and seeds and fruits for most of our calories.