Time to bust this weight loss-only myth once and for all!

The Truth: You CAN eat carbs — the "good" ones! Yes, you read that right. You CAN eat carbs and still lose weight! I know that a lot of trendy diets (like Atkins and Paleo) have popped up over the years based on the principle that a high-protein/low-carbohydrate diet is the key to weight loss. It's not.

I’m here to tell you that is mostly false and very unhealthy: You don’t have to banish carbs to lose weight. Even though you may want to limit starches, you don't have to succumb to a nutrient poor diet of animal protein and limited fruits, because you are afraid of gaining weight.

In fact, eating "nutrient rich" fruits as part of a superfood, high-nutrient density, or nutritarian eating style will even aid in your weight-loss efforts as your nutrient needs get met, you don't overwhelm your body with what does not promote health, and you naturally eat less. Think about it — fruits and vegetables have carbohydrates and they are the two best food groups out there. The key is choosing the right carbs to consume. Here are a few other reasons why carbs are NOT the enemy.

Healthy carbs help you feel full. But muffins, cupcakes, french fries, white bread, white rice…? These are the evil carbs. These refined and processed carbohydrates have very little nutritional value and can definitely make you gain weight — which is why it’s about time you replaced them with a healthy version or just eliminated them altogether. Carbohydrates that are 100 percent whole grain and fiber rich help you feel full because they get absorbed slowly into your system and keep your blood sugar balanced, and come packaged with thousands of nutrients.

Other healthy carbs that fit the bill? Look to non starchy vegetables, fruits, beans, and whole grains like quinoa (which is technically a seed), oats, wild rice...

Our bodies need carbs for fuel. Limiting carbs will never work long-term because our bodies crave and need them for obvious reasons. Depriving yourself of a major food group like beans for example, is not a manageable weight-loss plan because, like the elimination or limiting of fruits, the replacements wreak havoc on your metabolism.

One study found that women who severely restricted their carbohydrates for three days ended up binging on carbs the fourth day — eating 44 percent more calories from carbohydrate foods than they had before they restricted their carb intake. You should have real food carbs, health promoting protein, and essential fat in the the quantities they are available in whole natural foods.

Carbohydrate also help fight disease. People who eat three servings of whole grains a day are 30 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes. And that's just whole grains. The right mix of healthy "Nutrient Rich" carbs (because you are not just getting carbs when you eat nutrient rich foods) is the best way to control your blood sugar and avoid diabetes. Carbohydrate rich foods are also the vehicle for many of nature’s disease fighters, like phytochemicals.

Without real food carbohydrates, we’d be sitting ducks for cancer, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, chronic inflammation, and digestive problems.

The Bottom Line: Remember, while you should ditch white flour and white rice from your diet and cut back on refined carbohydrates, it is a mistake to eliminate all carbs. Healthy carbohydrates, such as fruits, vegetables, beans and whole grains are an essential part of a healthy, balanced diet. Enjoy!

The post MYTH: Carbs Are the Enemy appeared first on Nutrient Rich.

The other thing is, besides avoiding toxicity, which is important, we have to avoid excess in toxicity.  But besides that, we have to make sure that we have no deficiencies as well. 

Another thing that makes my recommendations different from, let’s say, the calorie restriction people - people who believe that calorie restriction is their means to live a long time, which it is; is that while calorie restriction in an environment of comprehensive nutritional adequacy is very important, it's not the whole thing either.   There are some important things we learned from this body of knowledge we call calorie restriction - but while that knowledge is important it is not everything. With calorie restriction diets, deficiencies can develop in later years, and those deficiencies could be a very bad thing. 

In today’s climate, for example, we’re living in northern climates.  We live indoors and we could develop deficiencies in vitamin D and a deficiency of any of the 40 known vitamins and minerals can cause problems. 

Other perspectives that form this body of knowledge we call dietary or "Nutritional Excellence"

We learn a lot from the body of knowledge that recognizes that raw food is rich in nutrients and adds a lot of fibers and natural enzymes that haven’t been destroyed by cooking and that it prevents the formation of acrylamides and toxic compounds which are not helpful in many diets.  We can learn a lot from eating a lot of raw foods and yet some of the concepts people advocate about raw food diets are false.  There are lot of myths and falsities that are promulgated in the raw food movement as well, such as raw foods supply digestive enzymes that aid in the food digestion of what we’re eating.  If we don’t eat those enzymes, our pancreas overworks producing enzymes and that ages us and enlarges the pancreas.  Just a whole bunch of nonsense in that movement that’s untrue but there are still a lot of good things too that we can learn from that. 

The same thing from natural hygiene. There are many things to be learned from that body of knowledge and historical interest is a very important foundation of good nutrition of natural foods and getting the full symphony of nutrients that can’t be duplicated in the laboratory and a lot of important things.  But that body of knowledge is not sufficient to today’s society to guarantee most people live to be 100 especially later on in life when our digestive absorption goes down and certain deficiencies can develop.  Each individual’s character and genetic variability is not taken into account to devise an optimal lifestyle for them.  So clearly, we have to be discerning about various bodies of knowledge giving advice, including the vegetarian or vegan movement, which had a lot of great stuff in it, but that alone, of course, can get us in trouble.

Now, even the Atkins camp gave us a lot and contributed a lot of good things to society, good ideas for people to live a long time because they talked to people how unsafe it was to eat refined sugar and white flour, and the idea that just because something is low in fat, it’s okay, that it’s good for us.  There’s a lot of publicity put out by those high protein camps to make people understand, that just because it’s low in fat, it doesn’t mean it’s good for you.  There’s still a lot of people who believe today, that just because you cut back on fat, you’re supposed to achieve good health and clearly, that’s nonsense and cutting back on fat is not the main criteria which enables a person to live long.  And there’s a lot of people, even the vegetarian movement, who still think that cutting back on fat is an important factor to make us live longer. 

So the other thing we’re talking about is the fact that we have to monitor our deficiencies as we get older.

A whole bunch of famous people, very well known people in the health food and natural food movement died young because they, let’s say, became B12 deficient or where they were found to be deficient in essential fatty acids or they had an increased genetic need for taurine or carnitine or they were low in vitamin D.  I see this all the time.  I see people that are healthy and they get some problem in later life.  And even though they lived a real healthy life, they didn’t develop heart disease or cancer, they start to deteriorate and age fast and develop later life problems. The benefits of a dramatic reductions against heart disease and blood pressure when they were young ends later in life when they begin to fade away as deficiencies express themselves.

So monitoring blood tests or taking supplements to assure no deficiencies develop because we’re all a little bit different and we all maybe have a little bit of different needs for vitamin D.  We may have a little different needs of B12.  Maybe some people need more DHA.  Maybe some people need more taurine on a diet style low in animal products or more carnitine.  Maybe some people need an extra selenium or zinc, and one people may need more iodine than others. 

So it’s just important to perhaps supplement an optimal diet to assure that deficiencies don’t develop or to take blood test to make sure that whatever the levels that they’re supposed to have, you have those optimal levels to assure nothing develops later in life that could be the result of deficiencies because I see this all the time with people.

So clearly, we talked about not having deficiencies.  You know, clearly a feature of living a long time is that diet does not have to be so strict.  The thing is, the most important thing about diet is not making it vegan and having no animal products, it's just not the most important factor.  Nutrient Rich Nutrition or "nutritional excellence" is about much more than that.

> Part 4 Animal Products

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Dr. Fuhrman is a New York Times best-selling author, nutritional researcher and board certified family physician specializing in nutritional medicine.  Learn more by visiting his informative website at DrFuhrman.com.

John Allen Mollenhauer is the founder of nutrientrich.com a Nutritional Education Trainer, and leading authority on Performance Lifestyle, which teaches people how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully and develop Your Lifestyle to better achieve your goals.

The post Dr. Fuhrman on Why Nutrient Rich Eating is Unique and Essential to Your Success – Part 3 – Avoiding Excess Toxicity and Deficiency appeared first on Nutrient Rich.

Right now, we say 80% of our population is overweight.  I say 90% sometimes because if I exclude people who smoke cigarettes which is about 10% and people who acquire diseases keeping them thin which is about 3% or 4%, then we’re close to like, I don’t know, more than 90% of the population has to be considered overweight.  So that immediately wipes them out of the potential for living a long life where they reach their elder years and maintain an excellent health.

So one thing we have to do, we certainly have to control overeating.  We have to control hunger as a means of living a long time because long-lived people do not overeat and don’t stuff themselves.  They’re not addicted to the food.  They don’t really have any strong addictions in like they don’t have a lot of alcohol consumption but a little of alcohol consumption is possible.  They can’t eat a load of junk food but a little as possible to still survive.  In other words, they’re not really addicted to any strong food to be relatively thin. In the Eat to Live book and my writings on the website, we talk about controlling hunger.  The 3-dimensional model takes into account calories of food, the volume of the food which includes fiber volume and, of course, the nutrient density of the food.  Any diet style or nutritional advice that doesn’t take into account those 3 dimensions of hunger isn’t quite giving you the optimal ability, opportunity to control your hunger and to maintain an optimal weight.

In other words, we have to consider all those variables.  Most diets just control calories.  They just try to count portion sizes, reduce calories and don't control for volume and nutrient intake, which leaves you craving and feeling ill all the time if you don’t constantly eat food. 

But there are some diets out there which just try to teach you to eat volume but they don’t control the nutrients.  They didn’t understand that the body needs sufficient amounts of nutrients, especially antioxidants, biochemicals that fuel the detoxification mechanism of the body.  And without a sufficient volume of those nutrients, our body maintains a high level of toxic waste products that then lead to withdrawal-like symptoms or so-called hypoglycemic sensations when you’re not eating food because your body is always borderline malnourished.

So one thing that the nutrient rich diet style and this lifestyle I recommend teaches is that nutrient density, nutrient per calorie density is critically important.  That’s one thing that makes it stand out from other nutritional advices - that it recognizes that the nutrient per calorie density of food is something we have to consider when looking to design a diet for optimal health.  Because as we get a diet that’s higher in nutrients, we need more foods that have a high nutrient per calorie density that supplies us with a large amount of volume and a large amount of nutrients which make us demand accordingly less calories and prevents overeating. 

At the same time that high nutrient density diet which prevents us from overeating, at the same time supplies us with a high level of phytochemicals and antioxidants that are necessary to survive a long time in our toxic world.  We don’t live in the same world that was around here 2000 or 5000 years ago.  We live in a more toxic world today and we particularly need a diet rich in foods that maximally fuel the body’s detoxification and self-reparative mechanisms.  And that diet of course has to be high in those phytonutrients, which are in natural food, especially green vegetables, various fruits, beans, seeds and other high nutrient foods that scientists have discovered are rich in those phytonutrients and antioxidants.

> Part 3 Avoiding Toxicity and Deficiencies

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Dr. Fuhrman is a New York Times best-selling author, nutritional researcher and board certified family physician specializing in nutritional medicine.  Learn more by visiting his informative website at DrFuhrman.com.

John Allen Mollenhauer is the founder of nutrientrich.com a Nutritional Education Trainer, and leading authority on Performance Lifestyle, which teaches people how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully and develop Your Lifestyle to better achieve your goals.

The post Dr. Fuhrman on Why Nutrient Rich Eating is Unique and Essential to Your Success – Part 2 - Controlling Overeating appeared first on Nutrient Rich.

As you may know, we published The Top 12 Findings of The China Study, by T Colin Campbell PhD and Thomas Campbell III nearly 5 years ago, long before The China Study became a mega bestseller; all the while knowing, that the findings of The China Study were seminal and long-lasting and the basis of a revolutionary new way of eating. I know this to be true, because whenever I talk to someone who is making a change in how they eat; often times before I even mention the findings of The China Study which so powerfully support a plant based diet, they bring the The China Study up to me!

I highly suggest you read The China Study which was based on a "living laboratory" that doesn't exist anymore.

Here's more about The China Study.

If you want to really get to know what we know eating nutrient rich foods and why, the kind of information that inspired us to publish nutrientrich.com then you will want to investigate this Certificate in Plant Based Nutrition from eCornell.

The Certificate in Plant Based Nutrition is eCornell Universities most popular online course!

You'll get an even bigger benefit with this knowledge in your mind, greater conviction and can even begin sharing these types of insights with others as a passion or a business.

The Certificate in Plant Based Nutrition is a great investment.

It's actually 3 Courses:

1. Nutrition Fundamentals: identifies the true causes of degenerative disease - poor dietary practices - and offers scientifically based solutions to reduce disease risk.
2. Diseases of Affluence: offers a solution to the crisis in America's health care system. It also provides a strong scientific foundation for your study of dietary excellence and optimal health.
3. Principles in Practice: demonstrates practical applications of plant-based nutrition in a variety of contexts – educational, corporate, athletics, medical, and the global environment – illustrating the powerful effects of a whole food, plant-based diet on our society and the positive impact its acceptance could have on our future

Sign up for the next course here: The Certificate in Plant Based Nutrition from ECornell.

It's a powerful science-based approach to nutrition that can dramatically reduce your risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity and improve your quality of life.

Description

Plant-Based Nutrition represents a forward-looking view of nutrition that Dr. T. Colin Campbell has developed during his more than 40 years experience in experimental research and 20 years in public policy. This certificate program presents a different paradigm, considering the topic of nutrition both as a science and as a component of the practice of medicine. It is an expansion of NS 200, a successful Cornell course approved by the Department of Nutritional Science and offered for 7 years. This new online series offers the best of Dr. Campbell’s work, incorporating material from his best selling book, The China Study, as well as the latest information from leading experts in the field.

This three-course certificate program was designed to introduce the general public and medical professionals to the vastly underestimated ability of properly executed nutrition to maintain health and prevent disease.

The first course in the series, Nutrition Fundamentals, identifies the true causes of degenerative disease - poor dietary practices - and offers scientifically based solutions to reduce disease risk. The second course, Diseases of Affluence, presents solutions to the crisis facing America’s health care system and a dietary solution for your own optimal health. The final course, Principles in Practice, demonstrates practical applications of plant-based nutrition in a variety of contexts illustrating the powerful effects of a whole food, plant-based diet on our society and the positive impact its acceptance could have on our future.

Together, these courses present a powerful science-based approach to nutrition that can dramatically reduce your risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity and improve your quality of life.

Who Should Take This Certificate?

This certificate program is essential to health care professionals (trainers, coaches, holistic health practitioners, doctors, nurses, chiropractors, dietitians, nutritionists), patients, teachers, parents and anyone in the general public with an interest in reaching optimal health and dietary excellence.

If you really want to get to know what we know, the kind of information that inspired us to publish nutrientrich.com and launched a food revolution, then the Certificate in Plant Based Nutrition is a great investment.

You can learn more about it here.

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