The Nutrition Hierarchy and Not Overthinking The Foundations of Good Health

With the onslaught of online information about nutrition, many patients come in concerned about when they should time their morning coffee, whether they should avoid brassica vegetables for their thyroid, if celery juice would benefit them.  They wonder about intermittent fasting, which protein powder to buy, and whether soy is healthy or not.   These questions are valid, but are almost always not important.  These are the sprinkles of the diet, not the foundation.   We don’t care about them until the foundations are in place and we maybe don’t really care about them for most people at all.

So what’s the foundation?  Eat food! Seriously - the toast crusts of your kids leftover breakfast aren’t cutting it.  Your brain and your body rely on the fuel that you’re getting from your food to function.  We need food/calories to fuel our body.  When your body is not getting consistent fuel, it puts it into a stress response where it’s trying to hold onto resources and is working really hard to keep your blood sugar stable.  Skipping meals or going >6 hours in the day without eating make things really hard on your body.   I would always prefer for you to eat something, even if it’s a take out burger and fries, than to not eat.  Even if you’ve moved to step 2 but you’re only having 2 meals in the day, you just don’t have enough opportunity to get enough protein, calories, and colourful fruits and vegetables to actually fuel your body!  So we always want to start with step 1 - eat food!

The next foundation is to have balanced meals.  We want your meals to have fruits and vegetables, we want them to have protein, and we want them to have complex carbohydrates.  They don’t need to have all of these things all the time, but we generally want to include these!

The next is to eat mindfully.  When we we are present with eating, our digestive tract works better and it makes it easier to absorb nutrients from the food.  It also helps us to notice cues of satiety.  We want to put the computer and phone away, take our time consuming food, be present with eating!

LASTLY and least importantly are the intricacies about food timing, micronutrients, food sensitivities, etc.  This needs the LEAST amount of your time and energy and effort.  If you’ve got steps 1-3 down and are ready for more - great - let’s discuss, but start with the basics!