The Perfect Diet?

What if there were a diet that lowered your cholesterol, balanced your blood sugar, reduced your risk of cancer, reduced your risk of heart disease, reduced your risk of Alzheimers, helped you lose weight and tasted great as well? What if this perfect diet were not a late night infomercial trying to sell you a product but a way of eating the foods already available right here in Lakewood, would you be willing to try it?

The perfect diet is simply the Mediterranean diet. It has been tested against the American Heart Associations low fat diet and has shown to do a better job of reducing cholesterol. It has also been tested and shown effective as a great diet for diabetics and people with blood sugar issues. Most recently it has been shown to reduce the incidence of Alzheimers. This same diet also includes many of the foods that were touted as longevity foods in The Blue Zones, Lessons for living longer from the people who’ve lived the longest by Dan Buettner.

This healthy way of eating includes foods such as legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, lean meats and fish, lots of green vegetables and well as every other color of vegetable and many fruits. It does not include trans fats, sugars, fried foods or processed foods.

The big difference is that it is a higher fat diet thus making it easier to stick to with the fats coming from healthy fats such as Flaxseed oil, olive oil, avocado and coconuts. It is also easy to follow this diet as a vegetarian.

One of the patterns I often see in my office with people who follow a very low fat diet is people have low triglycerides and yet will have high LDL cholesterol. Their livers are making the LDL to provide the body with the cholesterol it needs to function. When I see this pattern I have them increase their healthy fats and then their LDL cholesterol comes down.

The perfect diet is only perfect if it works to keep you healthy and the Mediterranean diet is one that can be adjusted to meet your individual health needs.

It is no surprise that eating healthy will improve your health but we do need to refresh our memory of what constitutes healthy foods when we are so inundated with information on eating right. It used to be that lots of carbohydrates and little fat was considered healthy, now we are finding that carbohydrates more quickly than fats are converted to stored fat.

We also are learning about different kinds of stored fat, some good and some bad. There is always lots to learn. If you are interested in learning more about healthy eating, wellness, heart and bone health, detoxification, the immune system and stress and weight gain LIVE WELL LAKEWOOD is putting on a free 10 Week Wellness Challenge, where we will discuss these topics and have a chance to work out with some of the great fitness experts in our community. Go to WWW.livewelllakewood.org for more information and registration.

Meg Gerba Perry is a Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine