The Two Foods You Need T Be Eating.

When we look at all the different kinds of foods, there are really only two types of foods you need to be eating. These are: all the colors of the rainbow in plants, and a good, healthy, clean source of protein. Technically these aren’t two separate foods but two kinds of foods. So let’s break it down.

“Eating the rainbow” is about eating the diversity of all the colors of plant matter. Why does this matter?

Plants produce pigments that are defenses for survival and natural selection. However this is a huge benefit to us as they provide not just our vitamins and minerals, but cancer fighting properties, anti-inflammatory properties, antioxidants and so much more. Foods that come in an array of colors also provide diversity for the gut microbiome. This is critical to our overall health and outlined in a previous post. Also, check out the chart before below to see all the different colors and some options of foods that you can begin to include slowly.

Protein. We have animal-based proteins and plant based proteins both sources provide the nine essential amino acids that we need. Animal base proteins offer it in a quick and smaller amount versus plant base proteins, which might require larger quantities of consumption and a various choice in how to obtain these essential amino acids. Regardless of which diet you subscribed to you still need to make sure you’re getting adequate amounts of protein. This is essential not only to build muscle, but to maintain the current muscle mass that we have. As we age, we lose a percentage of our muscle mass. We also need muscle to burn glucose and the more muscle we can build at an earlier age and maintain it as we age, the better for our 'health span'.

Exercise is necessary to maintain our current muscle mass while also creating an opportunity to increase muscle mass. Walking and strength training or resistance training are two great ways to burn stores of glucose by using our muscle. We no longer work in a way that utilize our muscles the way our ancestors did; therefore, we need to adapt to our current lifestyle and society. Going to the gym, hiking, biking, tennis, weight lifting, running, even yard/house work, gardening etc. are great ways to add more movement into our lifestyle. We spend 90% of our day indoors and mostly sedentary. It is imperative that we look at our lifestyle as a factor of our health issue rather than blaming our genetics.

In order to build a healthier body and mind eating the right foods and helping our children eat the right foods as soon as possible is going to set us up for a more resilient body, a healthy microbiome, build our immune system, and help prevent chronic illness and injury as we age.

Note: this information is for educational purposes only, it is a modified approach to make it easily digestible to the reader.