Healthiest Foods to Eat According to WebMD
Healthiest Foods
Healthiest Foods to Eat
Many people say that it is impossible to know what are the healthiest foods to eat since you hear so many conflicting things. For example you may hear paleo diet experts say that you should eat lots and lots of meat.
Maybe it is not so hard to know which are the healthiest foods to eat if you look in the right direction. This is important since it may be the single most important factor that determines how long that you live and the quality of your life.
This article was written July 3, 2015. Hippocrates said "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." Thomas Edison said "The doctor of the future will no longer treat the human frame with drugs, but rather will cure and prevent disease with nutrition." Ben Franklin said "To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals."
Under WebMD (webmd.com) it says "The leading source for trustworthy and timely health and medical news and information." WebMD gets about a million visitors a day. They have an article called The Benefits of Healthy Whole Foods. It says:
"We live in a society that eats so much processed and manufactured food, that I think there's some genuine confusion about what qualifies as a whole food," says Tara Gidus, RD, a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association.
The article explains why whole foods are healthier than processed foods. Of course whole foods or unprocessed foods are made by God or nature. Processed foods are made and sold by man to make money. They design it to be addictive so that you will eat as much food as possible. This is the same reason that they add over a hundred additives to tobacco.
The article also says:
Many studies have found that a diet high in healthy foods like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are associated with a reduced risk of diseases such as cardiovascular disease, many types of cancer and type 2 diabetes.
It says that what is healthy about whole foods is that they have plenty of fiber and phytochemicals (plant medicines). Please note that fiber has all sorts of benefits for the human body but it is only in plant foods. It is not in animal foods like meat or fish.
Here is what the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19335713) says about fiber:
Dietary fiber [fiber in diet] intake provides many health benefits. However, average fiber intakes for US children and adults are less than half of the recommended levels. Individuals with high intakes of dietary fiber appear to be at significantly lower risk for developing coronary heart disease, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and certain gastrointestinal diseases. Increasing fiber intake lowers blood pressureand serum cholesterol levels. Increased intake of soluble fiber improves glycemia and insulin sensitivity in non-diabetic and diabetic individuals. Fiber supplementation in obese individuals significantly enhances weight loss. Increased fiber intake benefits a number of gastrointestinal disorders including the following: gastroesophageal reflux disease,duodenal ulcer, diverticulitis, constipation, and hemorrhoids.
The above is part of the reason that the CDC, AMA (American Heart Association) and the Harvard School of Public Health, all say that Americans should eat more fruits and vegetables. For the exact quotes from them see The Scientific Difference Between Plant and Animal Foods.
There are thousands of phytochemicals in plant foods and are over 900 of them have been identified. The most famous ones are lycopene in tomatoes and watermelon, curcumin in the spice turmeric and resveratrol in grapes and peanuts.
WebMD also has an article called 25 Top Heart-Healthy Foods. Out of these foods only 2 of them are not plant foods. They are fish-- salmon and tuna. Actually I read that tuna is so high in mercury since it is a big fish (smaller fish have less mercury) that the only reason that they are not pulled from all the food store shelves is that it is such a popular food.
Other of these foods include black or kidney beans, almonds, walnuts, red wine with resveratrol [note that they spell it wrong-- reservatrol], tofu, soy milk, brown rice, blueberries, carrots, spinach, broccoli, sweet potatoes, red bell peppers, flaxseed, oatmeal, oranges, tomatoes, asparagus, papaya, dark chocolate, green tea and more.
WebMD has an article called 5 Foods to Boost Your Health. It lists leafy greens, olive oil (that has omega-9 fatty acids), flaxseeds (high in omega-3 fatty acids), oatmeal and tea.I have an article called 17 Health Benefits of Green Tea.
Note that I feel that chia seeds are better than flaxseeds. They also have a lot of omega-3 fatty acids but the whole chia seeds digest unlike flaxseed. They grind down flaxseed because of this but then it goes bad (rancid) quickly. Look down at the video below with Niomi Smart. She is holding a bag of chia seeds.
Note that the first article on the healthiest foods to eat on this explains that you should increase your percentage of whole foods not cut out all processed foods. That can be too hard and cause a lot of stress for you. Note that Michael Jackson said that he was " a STRICT vegetarian."
Imagine that a vegan learned that her meal had one tiny piece of meat in it and she gets so freaked out that she has a heart attack and dies. Also that article says that the really bad things about processed foods are the added sugar and salt. There are no unprocessed foods, including seaweed and fish, that contain salt. Did you know that WebMD has an article saying that salt is worse for you than smoking cigarettes. A link to that article is on my article Can Salt Make You Overweight.
Time Magazine Article on Healthy Eating
There is a May 23, 2015 article by Time Magazine called 15 Eating Habits That Make You Live Longer. It says:
The secrets to living long (and well) from the world's healthiest people. For more than a decade, I’ve been working with a team of experts to study hot spots of longevity—regions we call Blue Zones, where many people live to 100 and beyond.
It lists the different areas that it looked at. Then it came up with tips like get 95% of your food from plants, consume meat no more than twice a week, eat up to 3 ounces of fish daily, cut back on dairy [dairy has no fiber], drink more green tea, eat beans, eat 2 handful of nuts per day and more.
So the above is from a different source than WebMD and it is years later but it says similar things. It also says to eat whole grains instead of refined grains. A vegan medical doctor Joel Fuhrman M.D. says that to prevent disease eat G-BOMBS. It is an acronym for greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries and nuts and seeds. It used to be GOMBS but that was harder to remember than G-BOMBS.
For information on how pomegranate consumption reduces the plaque that clogs arteries and causes heart attacks and strokes see Health Benefits of Pomegranates. For the best food (blueberries) that helps to keep you younger longer (anti-aging) see Health Benefits of Blueberries. For the best food (cherries) that an MD says that can reduce pain and inflammation better than aspirin, see Health Benefits of Cherries.