Workout Wayne Versus Diet Dan

Workout Wayne goes to the gym an hour every day, but he eats breakfast, lunch and dinner at fast food restaurants.  Diet Dan eats a super healthy, well-balanced diet but he never exercises.

So who is healthier, Workout Wayne or Diet Dan?

It has to be Diet Dan.

We all know that diet and exercise are important to our health,  but if we had to choose between doing only one or the other, I am absolutely convinced that diet would be the right choice.  We fortunately do not have to choose between only exercising or only eating a good diet, we can and should do both as best we can.  I only make the point to stress the importance of diet, especially as we grow older.

Much press recently has been dedicated to a critique of processed foods.  A number of books, articles and studies have been written about them, with many reporting links to such things as cancer and developmental delays.  For 99.9% of human history, people have consumed relatively unprocessed foods:  fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains, meats, and fresh fish.  Processed foods entered the stage with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and advances in a number of food flavoring and preservation technologies.  Today, processed foods are omnipresent.   Your average supermarket is chock full of products laden with salt, sodium, added sugars, fat, dyes and all kinds of unpronounceable compounds ending in -ate or -ide.  Common sense tells you that most of these additives cannot be good for you.

Eating healthily in America is a real challenge because a significant portion of our food supply is crap.  Also, the profit hungry food-industrial complex has developed all kinds of additives that make unhealthy food more desirable to us. So how does one eat a healthy diet?  There is no end of books and web-based information sources promoting healthy diets.  I am not going to opine on what a healthy diet is, that is beyond my paygrade, but I do present two practical simple rules that can help greatly in pursuing a healthy diet.  

First, consume foods that are as close to their natural state as possible.  At one of end of the scale would be, for example, a carrot that has just been pulled out of the ground, washed and eaten.  At the other end of the scale would be a carrot that has been dyed, treated with preservatives, seasoned and frozen.  Fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains and meats and fish that are minimally processed are best.  Farmer’s markets and CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture)  subscription services that deliver fresh foods are good sources for these. 

A second rule, and it is follows from the first, is to examine the contents of items.  All packaged foods are required to list the ingredients and nutritional values of their contents.  These labels provide much useful dietary information.  A future post will explain what to look for in them.

Eating well takes discipline and a proactive approach to gaining product knowledge, but perhaps the most import thing is a positive mental attitude towards the entire issue of diet.  If we put crap in our body, we can expect crappy results in the form of excess weight, heart disease, diabetes, cancer or a whole host of other maladies.  We need to keep this fact in the forefront of our minds. We have to make the often very difficult choice between what we want and what we should have.  A cheeseburger with bacon and mushrooms and fries, or a salmon salad.  Tough choice, but you know the right one.

The Old Man hates a healthy diet.  Don’t be the Old Man.