What you choose to put on the end of your fork plays a fundamental role in preventing and healing chronic disease. There is no one ‘right’ diet that suits everybody. How can you determine the best way to eat to support your body and optimize your health as you age?
Making Sense of Diet Advice Overload
It can be utterly overwhelming, trying to make sense of all the dietary advice that bombards you daily. Diet information is such a hot commodity the average consumer can’t separate fact from fiction. Most research that reaches the public through social media, our inboxes, the web, and even mainstream news has been compromised and creatively packaged to sell rather than inform. When you try to navigate through the infinite number of diets out there, things get even more confusing.
You don’t have to go very far in an online search to get quickly bombarded with miraculous health claims from strict Vegans to hard core Keto folks. They all declare that their diet transformed their lives and that this is the ultimate plan guaranteed to transform yours.
How can you make sense of all the persuasive testimonials coming from such extreme ends of the diet spectrum? One explanation why both groups report such significant health benefits is that when individuals begin to adopt any new dietary regime, they usually increase their intake of nutrient-dense whole foods, increase their overall nutrition and therefore feel better. However, the profound health claims resulting from these opposing dietary approaches is much more complicated. When you look deeper, it appears that the benefits people are experiencing may not be as much about what they are eating but rather more about what they are not eating that explains the ‘life-altering’ changes they experience. Though the Vegan diet and the Keto diet sit at opposites ends of the diet continuum, there is a significant similarity that can account for some or a majority of this ‘transformational experience’. Each of them eliminates a specific set of potentially inflammatory foods.
Individuals who are sensitive to dairy or eggs, and whose bodies have been overburdened by the inflammatory fats, hormones and chemicals from factory-farmed meats will experience a remarkable shift in their health on a Vegan diet with these things eliminated from their bodies.
On the other hand, individuals sensitive to grains, legumes, corn and sugar will experience a similar shift in their health on their Keto or Paleo regime. They report more energy, less joint pain, less gastrointestinal upset, fewer headaches, and thrive when these particular things are eliminated from their bodies.
The take-home message: When individuals remove foods that have been causing inflammation in their body, they will experience a renewal of health on all levels regardless of the type of diet they are on or what food philosophy they have embraced.
This doesn’t explain everything though. It’s never that simple. Remember, not everybody who tries these diets experiences the same kind of renewal once they’ve been on them long term because over time some deficiencies can develop. The individuals who appear to thrive long term on any one of these particular diet regimes have not only reduced inflammation in their bodies, but they have also tapped into a way of eating that provides their particular body with the right micro-nutrient and macro-nutrient balance. They have discovered the diet that resonates with their unique biochemistry, nutritional needs, genetics and lifestyle.
What Suits One Does Not Suite All
In our hot pursuit to find the one’ ultimate diet’ that will help everyone we’ve stopped listening to our bodies for direction. Instead, we have been listening to everyone else and often end up feeling like failures because the diet that worked for our sister-in-law, our best friend, and our co-worker didn’t work for us despite our best attempts. In our culture, we’ve all sadly lost sight of the most essential nutritional principle that should be guiding all our dietary decisions-
Personalization. So, there is no one ultimate diet protocol that will suit every person’s needs, but there is an ultimate thriving diet out there for each individual. Each individual needs to honor their uniqueness and discover this for themselves based on their individual biochemistry, genetics and lifestyle.
How To Discover Your Thrive Diet
Step 1 – The Anti-Inflammatory Diet
To begin formulating your personal diet, you need to first determine if you have foods causing inflammation in your body. Unfortunately, there isn’t a standard list of inflammatory foods that everyone needs to eliminate. People’s responses to foods are very individualized. Many foods can be nutritious and healthy in one person’s body but actually can act like kryptonite in another’s. The most efficient, accurate and direct way to discover what foods may be causing inflammation in your body is through an Anti-Inflammatory Diet (AIDiet).
What is an Anti-inflammatory diet?
On this type of diet, there is no caloric restriction but a restriction of the most common inflammatory foods. You are guided to remove all of them at the same time for several weeks and then methodically add them back in to see if they create or worsen symptoms in the body. This allows you to experience firsthand the benefits of what your body feels like when these foods are first removed and then reintroduced.
Questions I hear often are: “I’ve never had food allergies in the past. How could I have one now? I’ve been eating the same way for years”. Many of you probably think this step is too simplified to have any profound effect on your health and don’t believe you have any food sensitivities. It’s important to understand that just because you have been consuming certain foods and eating a specific way for years doesn’t mean some foods aren’t causing a problem for you now. Food sensitivities or food allergies can develop over time. Even subtle irritations can accumulate through the years and contribute to chronic inflammation. By the time you reach midlife, these layers of irritation begin to stress your body systems and can contribute to symptoms like joint pain, fatigue, foggy brain, moodiness, anxiety, headaches and palpitations. When these symptoms develop in midlife, you mistakenly attribute them to aging when in reality, they are often triggered by your diet choices.
An Anti-Inflammatory Diet, therefore, is a non-negotiable first step for everyone as they begin to formulate the best diet to support their body through midlife and beyond.
- Many people experience relief from many of the symptoms they mistakenly thought were a natural part of aging. Aside from symptom relief, many women report renewed vitality, more energy, better mood and clearer thinking.
- You will discover what foods or eating patterns may be contributing to your symptoms of hormone imbalance.
- You will remove dietary inflammation that may be holding your hormone balance hostage. This allows your body to become more sensitive to lifestyle changes and will enable treatments to penetrate deeper into the body resulting in the least amount of intervention to create the most significant amount of change.
- You will establish a new baseline of health and be able to streamline treatment efforts at your core health issues and not superficial inflammation.
Reducing Inflammation is like buying health insurance. Discovering what foods are inflaming your body ensures that you build a path from surviving to thriving.
What Anti-inflammatory diet should I choose?
Find the method that works best for your personality and lifestyle because ease of use is going to ensure the most success. There are several books available and online programs that will help guide you. If you feel you need extra support, you may want to invest in a physician or nutritionist who is aware of the differences between food allergies, food sensitivities, and food intolerances and how to investigate these using your body instead of relying on expensive tests that often have a lot of false positives and false negatives.
Keep it simple. Don’t buy into a program that requires you to consume exclusive products, shakes, or detox supplements. If you embark on a strong detoxification program or begin a new supplement regime while on the diet you won’t be able to discern if the positive changes you experience are from the diet changes or the latest supplements. It will confuse your investigation and make it harder to identify your trigger foods. There’s plenty of time to add in supplements or launch into a detox afterwards.
Make sure the diet you choose focuses on fresh organic vegetables, organic fruits and clean unprocessed organic protein rather than prepackaged food or drinks. It should recommend avoiding at minimum the following foods: gluten, most grains, dairy, eggs, corn, soy, peanuts, nightshades, citrus, sugar and all synthetics chemicals, preservatives and dyes. For some individual’s food intolerances may be an issue so avoiding all legumes, nuts, histamine foods, tyramine foods etc. may be recommended depending on your health history and symptoms.
You are welcome to download my eBook that provides the general outline of the Thriving Anti-Inflammatory Diet that I recommend all people start with for midlife health issues. Please note if you have a lot of health issues and hypersensitivity reactions, I recommend you seek guidance from a physician experienced in fine-tuning these diets for specific food sensitivities and intolerances based on your health conditions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can’t I simply remove one food at a time and see if my symptoms get better?
It is necessary to remove all the potentially inflaming foods at the same time and not separately. The reason for this is you may have more than one food creating inflammation in your body. Imagine a scenario where you have three large tacks stuck in the bottom of your foot, causing pain. If you remove just one, will you probably not notice a difference in the pain. It’s necessary to remove all foods at once and follow a guided elimination and reintroduction phase to be able to accurately conclude whether a food is creating observable inflammation in your body.
What about food allergy testing?
Many people want to do food allergy testing because it’s easier. Unfortunately, allergy tests have are not reliable for food sensitivities or intolerances. For years I have worked with clients whose allergy testing missed significant food triggers that were compromising their health. This is mainly due to the following:
- Lab test inaccuracies. Anonymous samples of the same individual’s blood submitted simultaneously to a variety of laboratories showed only a 70% correlation at best between identical samples. Testing, therefore, can result in false positives and false negatives. This can cause you to continue to consume a food that is inflaming your system or remove a food that isn’t.
- Food irritants disrupt the body’s chemistry through a variety of mechanisms. Regardless of the mechanism involved, these reactions occur deep within the body and can cause many symptoms.
- Food allergies trigger an inflammatory response from your white blood cells, releasing antibodies and inflammatory chemicals to help protect you from a perceived invader.
- Food sensitivities irritate your system by setting off a cascade of inflammatory chemicals.
- Food intolerances occur when the body can’t break down specific chemicals present in a variety of foods.
Currently, there are no lab tests available that accurately test for all these three inflammatory mechanisms. The marketing efforts of lab companies, however, both online and in the alternative health care industry, will try to convince you and many health practitioners otherwise. With extravagant packaging, polished testimonials and elaborate ‘research’ reports, they claim that their test is the most accurate on the market. It could well be the most reliable for the one mechanism it’s testing, but it will miss the food reactions that aggravate your body through the other mechanisms.
Clinicians, who have been working diligently for years identifying inflammatory patterns in their patients agree with the research that concludes that a physician-guided anti-inflammatory diet is the ‘gold standard’ when it comes to identifying foods that cause observable symptoms in the body. There is a place for allergy testing in some cases; however, it is the second course of action after an anti-inflammatory diet. Using the diet with an experienced clinician will further increase its effectiveness and your success in interpreting the results.
If you have food reactions, it is important to work with a clinician to work to investigate the underlying cause of why you have them. This will prevent further sensitivities from developing and treating the cause may allow you to rotate some of these foods back into your diet in the future.
Congratulations to all of you who take on this challenge! Committing to an AIDiet is the most effective first step you can take in your journey to discover the ‘optimal diet’ that will best serve your body as you age. It creates the foundation from which you can begin to create your personalized Thriving Diet.
Step 2 Fine-Tuning Your Ultimate Thrive Diet
The next step to take once you have identified your inflammatory foods is to choose one of the low carbohydrate diets and modify it by listening to how your body responds and following up with labs depending on your health situation and health goals. At this stage, I highly recommend working with a clinician to incorporate your unique biochemistry in formulating your thriving diet. Working with a clinician will ensure that you have taken into account your specific nutritional deficiencies, biochemical imbalances, genetic variants and disease risk factors so you can fine-tune and create your own personalized diet to thrive as you age.
Conclusion:
In the quest for optimal health, it’s crucial to recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all diet. Personalized medicine emphasizes the importance of tailoring your diet to your unique biochemistry, genetics, and lifestyle. By starting with an Anti-Inflammatory Diet and working closely with a clinician, you can identify and eliminate foods that may be causing inflammation, paving the way for a personalized “Thrive Diet” that supports your long-term health. This individualized approach is key to not just surviving but truly thriving as you age.
