What is the Ideal Diet?

Three simple laws will change the way you think about food, whether you're keto, vegan, plant-based, carnivore, paleo, or anything in between.

There's a lot of conflicting information out there about what you should be eating. Never before has there been so much knowledge so readily available to so many different people about food. And never before have we had such tremendous accessibility to a seemingly endless variety of foods. But, on the other hand, never before have we seen so much chronic disease, and so much agricultural and chemical manipulation of food. Changing your diet can change your health and your life; but how do we know which changes to make? Starting with the three basic laws that any diet needs to abide by in order to be healthy, Dr. James Mohebali takes us through some very practical, simple steps that you can start using TODAY to change your diet and change your life.

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Transcript

Greetings and welcome to “Classic of Difficulties: Difficult Questions in Medicine, Acupuncture, and Beyond”. I am your host, Dr. James Mohebali. I’m a doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and I will be your armchair-philosopher-in-residence and your tour guide as we try to ask some difficult questions about medicine, health, alternative medicine, and maybe the meaning of life. My goal in this podcast is that, by asking and unpacking these tough questions, we will maybe leave with a couple of answers, but we will definitely leave with more questions than we had at the start.

This is episode 5: What is the ideal diet?

Well, if you’ve been following us here on Classic of Difficulties, you might have noticed that these past few episodes have been a little…heavy. They have been hard-hitting, philosophical, very enjoyable, but certainly not summer-time beach-listening road-trip material. Unless your idea of a road-trip takes place in the back room of a dusty, dark library. And, here in North Carolina, it is most certainly beach-going season. The water might be a little cold for some of you, but we’ve had the occasional 90 degree beautiful sunny day since the beginning of April. People are donning their swimsuits, their bikinis, speedos, and trunks, and they are getting ready to bare it all on the sandy shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

So what better topic for our show today than the perennial question of all people interested in health, fitness, and impressing strangers on the beach—the topic today is “what is the ideal diet?” That’s right; we try to the answer the very difficult question of what you should be eating, what you should be buying at the store, and how to figure out these tough questions for yourself and your body.

There are a lot of opinions now, especially with the rising popularity of diets that totally invert our usual understanding of health, like the ketogenic diet, where you eat mostly fat and almost no carbs, or the carnivore diet, where all those supposedly healthy fruits and veggies are totally off the table. So we will try to make heads or tails of all of these diets, and try to help you navigate what you should be putting in your mouth, and how often, and all that good stuff.

This episode is going to be light, it’s going to be practical, and it should be easy for you to digest. Because we all know how much contradictory and difficult information is already out there about what food choices to make. So let’s have some fun.

And, me, my idea of fun is Chinese medicine! So let’s start there.

I’m going to tell you right now, and I fully accept the risk that you just will click away to the next video as soon as you hear this: Chinese medicine does not have such a thing as an ideal diet. There’s not one perfect way to eat that applies to everyone, regardless of who they are.

I know. Frustrating, right? You just wanted to know about the ideal diet, and here I am telling you there isn’t one.

In Chinese medicine, we think that everyone is different. Chinese medicine is an individualized medicine, which means that no two people are alike. Everyone’s body runs in a different way, and so, in theory, everyone needs to eat something a little bit different.

But today, we’re keeping it simple. We’ll get into all that individual, personalized stuff in another upcoming episode on diet. But today, let me tell you the general, basic things that Chinese medicine DOES have to say about the ideal diet. There are certain rules that we can say any diet must follow in order to be healthy. Certain laws, so to speak, that you can’t get around, no matter what you eat. In this video, we’ll cover these laws of healthy eating. In the next videos in the series, we will cover the things you need to know to make your diet appropriate for the unique individual that you are.

First things first: no matter who you are, no matter where you are, no matter what you eat, you have to make sure the food has “qi” in it. Which sort of requires us to define the concept of qi. Qi is, of course, the cornerstone of Chinese medical thinking. It’s an untranslatable word that people translate in a variety of incomplete ways. Untranslatable? That sounds complicated. It is! But I said I was going to keep this episode light, so I am. So we’re going to avoid that discussion and definition entirely and just say, you want your food to be lively, and vibrant, and delicious, and full of life and full of joy and full of vitamins and colors and all that good stuff. That’s what it means when food has qi.

So what’s the difference between freshly cooked food and week-old leftovers? Freshly cooked food has plenty of qi, and the leftovers have less qi. What’s the difference between perfectly stir-fried broccoli and broccoli that has been boiled until it’s gray and stinky and unrecognizable? The perfect broccoli has lots of qi and the boiled broccoli’s qi was damaged by cooking. What’s the difference between that lumpy misshapen farmer’s market apple that tastes juicy and beautiful, and the perfect-seeming, shiny red delicious from the supermarket that tastes like a giant ball of wax? The farmers market apple has qi, and the grocery store red delicious has none.

So what affects the qi of food? A lot of different things. Growing conditions and farming practices. The time the plant is harvested. The qi of the particular plant, both in terms of species and variety. Like lettuce is different than carrots, and does different things in the body. But also, thai basil is different than Genovese basil, and does different things in the body. Cooking processes and food preparation. The way you cook food matters. How long the food has been stored, both in terms of storage after cooking, like leftovers, and storage before cooking, like the multiple weeks to several months of transit, processing, and storage that all the produce in the grocery store has gone through before we see it. And, of course, the qi of the food is influenced by the qi of the chef who made the food. Because food just tastes better when it’s made by someone you love, especially if that someone you love is a good cook.

Let’s go through these one by one. First, Growing conditions and farming practices. There’s the obvious issue of pesticides and toxic things and using tons of artificial fertilizers and soil additives that are made in labs. That’s an obvious no-go for most people interested in health. So, generally, if you can, eat organic. If you can’t, we totally understand. Organic stuff is expensive, and can be hard to get in certain areas of the country. I’m going to say this one and I’ll say it again. Eating organic is not the end all be all of health. A strong body can deal with a little bit of toxic chemicals here and there. Is it important to eat organic? Yes. Is it the end of the world if you can’t? No.

There is something that’s a lot more damaging than eating conventional, non-organic foods: it’s called ORTHOREXIA. Which is greek for Correct Eating. It’s an eating disorder, and it means that someone is totally and completely obsessed with only eating the best, cleanest, most correct foods. You can have an orthorexic vegan, you can have an orthorexic carnivore, you can have an orthorexic keto person, orthorexia can be part of any diet.—What is the word for a keto person by the way? Ketonite? Ketonian? Or after being keto for long enough, do they actually, finally just turn into Ketones?—In Chinese medicine, we recognize that nothing in life is perfect, and so, naturally, your diet won’t be perfect either. So first step to eating healthy? Loosen up! It’s just food.

Back to growing conditions. The thing about growing conditions and farming practices is that it doesn’t just end with “avoid chemicals.” Anyone who has ever had wine, for example, knows that two different wines, made from the same exact species of grape, can taste very, very different when they’re from two different vineyards. Like a French cabernet tastes very different than a California cabernet. But these differences can get really really specific. Expert wine tasters can pinpoint the region, often down to the exact vineyard and the exact year, just using the information they know about historical climate data, soil composition, geographical regions, and, of course, their own highly refined sense of smell and taste. In some cases, there are even vineyards that are directly adjacent to one another, like on the other side of the same stream, or across the road from one another, and the wine from these two vineyards taste completely different; one might command a very, very high price, and the other could be a middling grade wine at best. All of these geographical, geological, and climatic influences are grouped together in Chinese thinking; they all are grouped under the idea of the qi of the grape. The circumstances under which the grape grew up influence who the grape is. What makes you who you are? Where you grew up, who was president at the time you were a kid, what shows were on TV, what schools you went to, who were your friends in high school, all of that aggregates into the QI of who YOU are.

But a little more went into you than just WHERE you planted your roots, right? Your mom and dad also had some influence. Not just genetically speaking, but things like “Did they give you lots and lots of positive encouragement, or were they distant and aloof?” There are systems of agriculture that put a lot of emphasis into these type of little things. Think about the old science fair experiment of growing certain plants and playing them Mozart and growing other plants and playing them Heavy Metal. Mozart plants always win, right? Biodynamics is probably the largest example of a system of agriculture that really puts the qi of the plant and the farm at center stage. They do a lot of stuff with plant and animal symbiotic relationships, they pay attention to the cycles of the sun, moon, and stars and their influence on the plant, and, of course, they pay particular attention to the liveliness of the soil. Biodynamics is a system of agriculture started by the philosophies of Rudolf Steiner, but nowadays, you can even find biodynamic products in places like Whole Foods.

The key idea of biodynamics, and the key idea of Chinese medical thinking about food, is that food isn’t just healthy because it happens to be a particular species and variety of plant, like broccoli isn’t automatically healthy because it’s broccoli. We think that healthiness comes about because the plant, or the animal, is actually in a healthy relationship with the natural world, with the influences of heaven and earth. And our job as farmers is to encourage and cultivate the plant’s healthy relationship with heaven and earth, and our own healthy relationship with both the plant and with heaven & earth.  From this, it’s easy to see why chronic disease is running rampant nowadays, why food allergies are worse than they ever have been before, why everyone and their mother seems to be gluten intolerant all of a sudden, when for thousands of years, half the world lived on glutinous grains like wheat. Our food is poisoning us because we are poisoning our food. It’s really that simple. And our relationship to our food is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our unhealthy relationship with the world around us. Modern man is completely out of sync with the world around him.

I can hear you thinking: “yeah, everybody knows that we’re poisoning the earth and causing ecological catastrophes left and right. That’s old news.” We might all be familiar with the argument that we’re in a toxic relationship with EARTH, but part of what makes biodynamics and Chinese medicine unique in this discussion, is that we’re not just talking about man’s relationship to earth. As I’ve said before, in episode one, man mediates between HEAVEN and earth. Without paying heed to the fullness of man’s experience, paying attention to both his spiritual life and his earthly life, we still inevitably fall short. And the food we grow will always reflect both our spiritual and our earthly sickness. Our relationship to heaven is just as important to the health of our food and our bodies as our relationship to earth.

So the BEGINNING of healthy food is healthy qi in the plant, which grew in healthy soil, at the right time in the heavenly cycles, was treated nicely, and had a happy, harmonious life before it was brutally cut short by Farmer John and his harvesting team. Then we have this beautiful, happy, perfect, plant and, we buy it from the market, and it gets into our kitchen. So what do we do with it? Well we could boil it into oblivion, we could deep fry it, we could steam it, we could stir fry it, or we could just eat it raw. Or, God forbid, we could microwave it! But more on microwaves later.

So the Chinese thinking, which I personally think makes sense, is that we want to cook everything perfectly so that the inherent character of the ingredient is best showcased. Let’s take broccoli for example. I think it’s a particularly good example because Chinese didn’t originally have broccoli. They have Chinese broccoli over there, gai lan, and it’s really a different thing, it’s leafy and it’s light, and it doesn’t look a whole lot like broccoli. But of course, everyone who has ever had Chinese takeout knows beef and broccoli, and Chinese, even in China, actually love western broccoli now that they do have it. So it’s a perfect example of taking a philosophy of food, a way of thinking, and applying it to new, modern circumstances. Adaptation. Well, there’s a lot of ways that you can eat broccoli. Take raw broccoli, for example. Raw broccoli is just not my favorite food. I really don’t like it. It’s hard to digest. The texture is weird. It kind of feels like you’re chewing on a hairbrush. Even if you slather it in ranch, it’s just not great. I wouldn’t EVER consider eating raw broccoli if it weren’t for those weird catering platters that invariably include it, kind of implicitly insisting that it’s just as good as carrot sticks or celery sticks, and that it’s just as socially acceptable to lay out raw broccoli for your guests. Yuck. Let’s take the other end of the spectrum: Broccoli that’s been boiled for a long time. It just kind of smells like sulfur. And it’s mushy. And it doesn’t really have any of those positive attributes of broccoli. From a Western scientific perspective, by boiling it for a long time, you’ve actually destroyed all those nice nutrients, those vitamins and minerals, that are in broccoli. So what do the Chinese do? Well, first they blanch the broccoli very, very briefly, for like 10 seconds, in boiling water. Dunk it in for ten seconds and then done. It’s beautiful, as soon as the broccoli hits the water, it immediately flashes into this rich emerald green. Then 9 seconds later they take it out. Then they take that broccoli and toss it into a very hot wok, and they stir fry it. I know this because I did this the other day, and it was awesome. It came out perfectly. The broccoli was crisp, not too stiff, and it just looked green and happy and tender. And, of course, it was covered in oyster sauce, so that’s always good.

So not only do we have to get high quality, happy plants and animals, we also have to do our part in the process. We have to cook them in a way that really honors them, honors the ingredient. Farmer John didn’t spend all that time growing that broccoli just so that you could go and destroy all of the qi that he and the broccoli had worked so hard on. That qi is like the life story of the broccoli. And the life story of farmer john for that matter. You want the broccoli to be able to tell its life story. Same thing with the cow that becomes your T-bone steak. The cow has had this whole long beautiful life on this farm, and you want to hear about it. And the way that we hear about the story of food, the way that we interact with the life and narrative of the food, is by eating it. By putting it into our mouth, chewing, paying attention, and giving respect to it.

Everything with food has this element of respect. At least if you want to have a healthy relationship with food, it’s founded on respect. Again, we are stewards, negotiating between heaven and earth. Not only are we stewards when we garden and farm, we are also stewards when we cook. So to be a good steward, to do our part, we really need to cook in a way that honors the ingredients that we harvest from nature, After all, these ingredients, both plant and animal, have given up their lives so that we could live. To be really healthy, not just spiritually speaking, but physically speaking, we ought to honor the sacrifices that they’ve made for us.

Now I think is a good time to talk about the microwave issue. I know, it’s controversial. But who doesn’t love a bit of controversy? So I just mentioned that all of our cooking methods are a way of paying respect to the food that we eat. We enter into a relationship with our food through the process of cooking, and we can tell whether this is a happy relationship through the process of eating. Just the same way you can tell how much love somebody put into their food by how good it tastes. In a way, restaurant food will never taste as good as home cooking, because the person who is cooking for you hopefully loves you a lot more than that professional chef who’s never met you. So it only follows that if we have a happy relationship with the food, the food should taste good, and this means that the food is healthy. And if we have an unhappy relationship with the food, the food will taste bad, or at least, not as good, and this means that the food is unhealthy.

This type of thing, this type of evaluation is called Organoleptics. What that means is that we use our senses to determine the quality of something. This is commonly done with fine wine, but it’s also done with your average gallon of milk on the shelf. Organoleptics is a big part of how we understand the properties of a substance in Chinese medicine, whether that substance is a medicinal herb, or whether it's a food. Makes sense, right? We didn't have laboratories in ancient china, so we had to analyze medicinal properties and analyze the quality of medicinal substances somehow.

So microwaves. Everyone has heard mixed things about microwaves –like “they’ll kill you, they make your food radioactive,” or maybe “they’re harmless, they just vibrate the bonds,” and so on and so on. But the nail in the coffin for microwaves comes from organoleptics. Let me clarify: if food needs to be vibrant, flavorful, and full of life in order to be healthy, then microwaves are not just unhealthy, they're anti-healthy. Think about it from personal experience, you've got this healthy, flavorful home-cooked meal. It tasted so good last night. You have some more of it that you planned on eating for lunch the next day. So you zap it in the microwave. After doing that: it doesn't taste like it did the night before. It doesn't smell like it did the night before. That healthy, delicious, home cooked meal has lost all it's flavor, and just tastes like a pile of slop.

How do we know that microwaves aren’t healthy for you? Because the food you make in the microwave doesn’t taste good. It doesn’t taste like itself! Try heating up your leftovers any other way, on the stove, on the grill, whatever – I guarantee you, they’ll taste better, and you’ll end up eating more of your leftovers. We can rationalize and expound upon this knowledge by testing the foods and discovering that microwaves actually reduce the vitamin content in the food, but all we need to really know is right under our nose so to speak.

Even though it seems like common sense, this organoleptics thing is kind of a revolutionary idea. That you should be able to taste that things are healthy for you. That a juicy, flavorful farmers market apple is actually healthier for you than an off-season, waxy, fluorescent lights in the big box store apple. The lesson of organoleptics is a particularly a stark contrast to what Dr. Tom Cowan calls the “cosmic joke theory of medicine.” The “cosmic joke” theory is the one that’s prevalent in mainstream western medicine. They say that you shouldn’t eat fats, and you shouldn’t eat salts, and you shouldn’t eat red meats, and you shouldn’t do all of these things. All these things that taste good, they’re actually bad for you. Ultimately, it comes down to this weird but prevalent worldview that the reason why fats and salts taste good is that we’re being punished by the universe—like it’s all one big cosmic joke. Taking it from an organoleptics perspective—if food tastes good, it probably offers us something that we need. God isn’t punishing us by making bacon. God made bacon because he loves us and he wants us to be happy.

This can get a little complicated with artificial substances like MSG, or things that are so thoroughly manipulated that they're basically artificial, like white refined sugar. But that is a huge and interesting topic that we will get into in a different episode, which is coming soon, "are natural things good and artificial things bad?"

So rules one and two: food has to have qi. And we have to conduct ourselves in a way that preserves the qi, in terms of cooking, in terms of food storage, in terms of harvest, etc. Now for rule three: the qi of the food has to be accessible to us. Now, part of the problem with raw broccoli is that raw broccoli has these thick, impenetrable cellulose walls. And we humans, unlike cows and the variety of other animals, we can't break down cellulose. We just don't have the gut bacteria, we just don't have four stomachs, we just don't have what it takes. So what we need to do to access those vitamins and minerals is we need to break down those cellulose walls. How do we do that? Well the first, and probably the most common way, is cooking. There are other ways, too. You can also ferment, which is kind of like external digestion, right? After all we don't have the bacteria inside of our gut to break down the cellulose, but we can find the proper bacteria outside of our gut.

There's a saying that I often use that I borrowed from my teacher Jeffrey: nutrition equals food plus digestion. If you can't digest it, it doesn't matter how healthy it is, it won't nourish you. So we need to break things down externally in order to make them something that we can use internally.

In Chinese medicine, we have an interesting way of abbreviating this whole discussion. We say that the function of the stomach is to ripen and rot the food. So, if you put food in your stomach that's already ripe, you take out one step of the process, and make the job easier for the stomach. And if you put in food in the stomach that's already rotted, that is, already fermented, then you take out another part of the stomach's job.

All this might sound familiar in terms of the discussion of raw vegetables, but the cool thing about this principle of ripening and rotting is that it applies to everything. So you often hear about the anti-nutrients, like lectins, that are found in grains and beans. And the way to denature these lectins is by sprouting grains and beans. Using The idea of ripening and rotting, we see that the problem is that grains and beans, left to their own devices, really won't ripen and rot. Grains and beans are hard for our stomach to digest because they are shelf stable. So in order to make them something useful to us, we need to render them into something perishable, not shelf stable. And sprouts are extremely perishable. They’ll go bad in your fridge quickly, and they’ll get a really strong smell really fast. I just want to make a shout-out right now to all my Persians, who will forever remember the smell of rotting sabzi, leftover from the New Years table, and waiting around until it can finally be thrown out on sizdah bedar.

But returning to the Chinese medical physiology, another benefit of understanding this discussion of food and perishability in terms of organ principles, like ripening and rotting, is that we can adapt to new phenomena. Like just because preservatives and artificial food additives didn't exist in ancient China doesn't mean that we can't apply our theory to them. So the problem with preservatives, the problem with a lot of food additives, and part of the problem with hydrogenated oils, is that all of these things are designed to prevent ripening and rotting. So when they get into our stomach, they are fundamentally incompatible with what the stomach is trying to do. They look like food, and they look like food for longer amounts of time on the shelf, but they're really not food. They're kind of like mummies. Preserved, desiccated, and really absent of that life that we really want to see in our food. And this doesn't just apply to artificial preservatives, this even applies to your organic, all natural, whole foods shelf-stable foods. If it doesn't rot, It won't nourish you. That is, if it doesn't rot, it's not food.

This is, of course, a little simplified. Food that has a shelf life has a role in a healthy diet. We will get into this more in the next episode on food, but varying our diet with seasonal changes is totally critical for health. So we generally ought to eat a lot more nuts and root vegetables in winter, foods with a shelf life, and we ought to eat more fresh fruit and raw fish, like sushi or ceviche, in summer, foods that are highly and rapidly perishable. Of course, everyone is different, and every health situation is different, and every climate is different, so this winter-summer model is also a major oversimplification. But like I said, we’re keeping it light this episode!

So the three main rules that any healthy diet should abide by is one, eat food with qi in it, which comes about by fostering healthy relationships between you, heaven, earth, and your food. two, enter into a healthy meaningful relationship with your food through the process of cooking and eating, which is summarized as, don't destroy the qi in your food. And three, pay attention to whether your food is shelf stable or not. Sometimes we do want food that is more shelf stable, like eating dried fruits and nuts and winter and when we travel long distances to sustain us for long periods of time. But most of the time, we want food where the nutrition, or qi, is readily available to us.

There are some other nice rules in Chinese medicine, but I think that if you follow the three I just mentioned then the other rules kind of fall out naturally from them. Like eat slowly, chew well, enjoy your company as much as you enjoy your food. Nothing in excess, everything in moderation, that sort of thing. All of this seems pretty obvious if our number one priority with food is to enter into a healthy physical, mental, and spiritual relationship with our food.

The last rule, before we sign off for this episode, comes from another attribute of the stomach. In Chinese medicine, we say that the stomach likes to empty and fill, And it likes to do this at regular intervals. And this applies to the intestines as well. So to facilitate this, we say that it's best to eat at regular times, and that it's best to eat discreet meals, rather than nibbling a little bit all the time. For this one, rather than giving you an elaborate explanation, I'm just going to give you a challenge: try it yourself, practice your organoleptics, and see how you feel. See if you feel different when you eat three discrete meals, versus nibbling a little bit all day. And see which one you like better.

The foundation of Chinese medicine and are thinking about food came from people just like you, eating, digesting, and noticing. Noticing how they felt, noticing how different foods had different effects on them, and trying to notice trends. And the foundation of a healthy, meaningful, individual relationship with food is just that: eating, honoring, and noticing.

So stop thinking! Stop reading! Go out there, hit the beach, and eat some beautiful tasty fruit. I guarantee you, that fruit will taste even better if you pick it yourself.

That brings us to the end of this episode. I hope that you enjoyed it, I hope that you learned a little something about and diet, and picked up some good general rules to guide your personal experimentations and explorations with food. In the next two episodes on food and diet we will be discussing individual considerations, like which diet is perfect for you in particular, as well as some of the most popular diets around nowadays and how to make sense of some of these hot trends.

So until next time, keep asking questions, and stay difficult!