What is the #1 Rule in Nutrition?

A few posts ago we looked at Michael Pollan’s brilliant nutritional philosophy:

Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.

Love that.

When it comes to the #1 Rule in Nutrition, you might be surprised that it is more about what you DON’T eat than what you do.

Brian Johnson from Optimize says that you can’t eat enough broccoli to make up for the pizza and bucket of movie theater popcorn you just ate. No offense to pizza or movie theater popcorn (2 of my kryptonites).

Mark Hyman puts it this way, “You can’t exercise your way out of a bad diet.”

Maybe you could when you were younger, on the surface, but eventually it will catch up to you.

So if the #1 Rule in Nutrition is to stop eating the bad stuff...what’s the bad stuff?

Here’s the 3 that most every nutritional expert agrees upon:

1. Sugar - In particular, added sugar in all its forms

2. Flour - Sorry pasta, bread, crackers, bagels, etc.

3. Vegetable Oils - Our consumption of vegetable oils has increased over 100,000 times since the beginning of the century. More on why this is dangerous later.

For now, avoid the following vegetable oils found in almost all processed foods: (Soybean, Canola, Corn, Cottonseed, Sunflower, Safflower, Peanut, Sesame, and Rice bran).

Our bodies just don’t know what to do with these 3 things.

Many people would say to get rid of these completely. That would be ideal. To me, in reality, that seems daunting for many people.

What if you started by reducing them as much as possible. What’s the easiest way to do that? Eat whole foods...not processed “edible food-like substances” as Michael Pollan so cleverly calls them.

Start slow...or go all out and have a sugar, flour, and vegetable oil purging party.

Either way, let’s start significantly reducing our consumption of sugar, flour, and vegetable oils...one-minute at a time.