What is the best rule to follow for a healthy diet?

Some say eat whole foods. They say eat foods that are basically in their natural state and didn’t need to be processed to be edible. You can be very lax with this rule, by allowing yourself sugar (controversial as any form of sugar triggers appetite especially if avoiding carbs) and salt as long as you add it yourself ; or you can be strict, by excluding olives and legumes. The choice is yours. Just stick to whole foods.

Maintaining enough vitamins. minerals (including proper levels of salts like sodium and potassium) and proteins while limiting carbs, sugars (of any form including “natural” sugars like those found in whole fruit and natural fruit juices) and calories is by far the most important rule to a healthy diet regardless of their source and whether or not they are “natural” or “whole”. Repeated studies have shown that having excess body fat, type 2 diabetes and weight gain are resultant from eating and storing more calories than one burns. Eating too many of any form of calories whether from whole foods or not will cause these problems. A Newcastle University team has recently (2011) discovered that Type 2 diabetes can actually be reversed by an extreme low calorie diet alone (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/biomedicine/news/newsitem.htm?id=diet-reverses-type-2-diabetes).

There is no evidence which excludes “whole” foods calories from this fact and whole grains are some of the highest calorie, low vitamin foods around. There is also no evidence that calories from low fat or high fat foods are any different from other calories for weight control.

Calories are calories and as long as you have a source of essential vitamins they are the same.

Fat calories are not “worse” than other calories. In fact fat has many essential vitamins and no health risks contrary to popular beliefs. Native peoples in the far north got virtually all their vitamins from the fat and organ meat of the animals they ate as there were no vegetables in that climate, and before the introduction of modern processed foods they had extremely low rates of heart disease. Additionally the linking of saturated fats to heart disease is a myth and has been completely dis-proven. The most recent studies including a meta study of over 347,000 people across 23 years (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648) showed no increase of cardio vascular problems from consumption of saturated fats. Fats are essential for many bodily functions including metabolism and brain function. Best estimates are that congestive heart disease (arterial clogging) comes from too many blood sugar peaks brought on by over consumption of sugars, carbs and starches at rates higher than your body can control their effect on blood sugar (another reason to avoid carbs and sugar) and perhaps over consumption of calcium which is a also component of arterial clogging.Heart attacks themselves are often now linked to inflammatory response of the body reacting to changes in injured or scarred arteries (which may explain why small doses of anti inflammatories like aspirin reduce the risk of heart attack.)

So what’s the dietary answer? Make sure you get your vitamins, protein, minerals and salts and fluids you need from somewhere and don’t consume more total calories than you burn each day regardless of what type of calories they are. Other than that try to avoid things that likely aren’t good for your body such as preservatives and other non nutritional substances of unknown effects that can be avoided.