What You Need to Know to Craft the Perfect Diet for You

There's more to food than just calories and macros. Figure out how to pick the best diet for you, and how to get ahead of the next big thing.

There are a lot of factors that go into understanding the perfect diet! From social to geographical, economic to cultural, join Dr. James Mohebali as he explores some of these considerations, and helps you understand how to sift through all the contradictory information that's out there about diet. On the way, we take a look at why Italians love tomatoes, how to deal with damp, muggy climates, and whether or not Mexicans are immune to hot chili peppers. Using Feng Shui, terroir, and cultural archeology, we look at some popular diets, like the ketogenic diet, and try to understand what role they can play in healing our chronic diseases and proactively maintaining our health.

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COOL STUFF I MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
Prior "Classic of Difficulties" Episode on "What is the Ideal Diet?"

Excellent Cookbooks to Help Your Search for a Culturally Rooted Cuisine
Fuchsia Dunlop's "Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking"
Fuchsia Dunlop's "The Food of Sichuan"
Fuchsia Dunlop's "Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province"
Fuchsia Dunlop's "Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China"

Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's "Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking"

Najmieh Batmanglij's "Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies"
Najmieh Batmanglij's "Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes & Kitchen Secrets"
Najmieh Batmanglij's "Joon: Persian Cooking Made Simple"

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Music Credit:
"Let Yourself Be Huge" - Cloudkicker (under Creative Commons License)

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 7: What is the best diet for you?

Last episode on diet, episode 5, we talked about some general considerations about the best diet. We talked about the relationship that one should have to food, to the land that their food grows on, and to the heavens above – which came out of left field and was a surprise player in our discussion of food and health. Definitely check out that episode if you haven’t seen it, it is a good one, and it’s a lot of fun.

We told you in that episode that, much to the dismay of both the hyper-correct eaters and the politically incorrect eaters, that there is no one correct way for everyone to be eating. Every individual person is a unique, beautiful snowflake, and every individual person needs a unique, individualized snowflake diet.

So the trick becomes how we can know what type of person needs what type of diet, and how to tell what type of person you are. That way, you can know about the absolutely best possible diet for you to achieve whatever goals you have with your body and your life. And then you just only eat that and only that for the rest of your life, right?

Well, of course, it’s not that simple. Nothing ever is in this life!

There are a lot of factors at stake in what we eat and what we should eat. Food is so much more than just body fuel, and that’s, in part, because life is just so much more than just having a perfectly running body. Sounds like anathema to the alternative health ears, but let me explain.

Let’s start with the keto diet. It’s a great diet. I’ve lost a lot of weight on it personally, I’ve seen a lot of patients and friends and acquaintances lose weight on it. I’ve seen it do some amazing things therapeutically for specific conditions. It can also cause some negative effects, but we’ll get into those later. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the diet, let me explain the basic concept. Instead of eating carbs for fuel, you want your body to run on fat. It’s a common mistake that people end up high on protein, but you really want your body to run primarily on fat. So that means eating almost no carbohydrates (which includes sugar, bread, grains, fruits, root vegetables, anything starchy) and instead eating a ton of fat. Like way more fat than it’s really possible to eat while still appearing normal to friends and family members. In fact, if you eat things that appear “normal,” then most likely you’re actually going to end up eating too much protein, and messing with your macros (that’s macronutrients, for the uninitiated). So what do you eat? Fat bombs. Like coconut oil plus peanut butter plus like maybe some cocoa powder for variety. Or like a tablespoon of butter, wrapped in a piece of bacon, with two pecan halves shoved into it somewhere. That’s a fat bomb. And then you just eat this so called “fat bomb.” You eat these “fat bombs,” you gleefully search for new “fat bomb” recipes and share the good ones, like a “fat bomb” is just a normal thing for a person to eat, like it’s just as normal and socially acceptable as chicken soup, or a sandwich.

If you’ve ever been keto at a party, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The party has this great spread, they’ve got everything. Beautiful pastries, savory and sweet, fresh fruit galore, tiny quiches in every flavor, tasty little cakes. And you scope it out sadly, knowing that all you’ll be eating is chunks of cheese, no crackers allowed, and cold shrimp cocktail. If you’re lucky, there’s little meatballs with toothpicks in them. And so you heap a bunch of them onto your plate. And everyone kind of looks at you like: “you’re just going to eat meatballs? That’s it?”

So you say, “Oh, I’m keto now. It’s for my health. I feel great.”

And they say, “Oh. Okay.” And walk away.

There’s a big social component to food in Chinese medicine. As I mentioned in episode one, the strength of our digestive system doesn’t just have to do with what food we put in, it also has to do with the strength of our family ties, and our relationships with other people and our society. This is something you often see clinically with people that medically need to follow a specific, restrictive diet, like keto. Their spleen starts to get depleted; not necessarily because there’s something about the diet itself that does that (although that can be true in some cases), but because they start to feel isolated. Every meal they eat, it kind of alienates them from their family and friends. They start to feel like a weirdo, set apart from everyone. They can’t even have their comfort foods anymore – after all, comfort foods are rarely compatible with restrictive diets. Often with chronic disease like cancer, that meal apart from their loved ones starts to take on a negative meaning – it starts to be a constant reminder that they’re sick, a constant reminder that they might be slowly dying, and a reminder that they’re not in control of their lives, and not able to participate in “normal” life.

Sometimes this is exactly what people need therapeutically. Sometimes the way they’ve been living their life, their “normal” has actually been a contributing factor as to why they’re sick. Their relationship with food needs to be reinvented, as does their relationships with family, and maybe their relationships with a whole lot else. Other times, this alienation can be totally counter-productive. If isolation and alienation are a component of why somebody developed a disease, then it certainly won’t do any good to eat a diet that causes more isolation and alienation, even if that diet is ON PAPER the best diet for them.

So in addition to the therapeutics of the food itself, the social reality of food plays a big part in understanding the optimal dietary choices for a particular person. What else can complicate the situation? Oh, lots of things. Another one is the geographical realities of your life. Like where you live, what the climate is like where you like, what the terrain is like where you live, what’s naturally available where you live, and all that good stuff.

Why would something like this matter? Well, if we look at keto again, we can start to see the pattern. Proponents of keto often argue for the health and safety of long term ketosis by pointing out that some people live their whole lives in ketosis, and have done this for generations. Who are these people? Alaska natives, Eskimos, Laplanders – tribal people that have lived in the coldest places in the world for generations. And what do they eat? Whale blubber, and animal protein, almost no plants at all, and tons and tons of fat. Why? Because just like seals and whales, we need fat to keep us warm. And eating fat, eating animal protein in Chinese medicine is WARMING. Just like eating plants, and things like watermelon and mint, they’re COOLING.

So you would expect that these cold-weather people would do well with a ketogenic diet because they need to produce a tremendous amount of warmth in their body to survive. But what happens when you go to the American south? Or, Mexico? Well a ketogenic diet might be indicated for therapeutically for a variety of reasons, but you need to be cognizant of the fact that you are going to make a tremendous amount of heat. Like melt the icecaps amounts of heat. So in the hot, humid summer, in order to stay in balance, you’re going to have to modify your diet, or your lifestyle, or take some kind of remedial measure to stay cool if you’re still going to follow a ketogenic diet.

Part of how we easily and effortlessly navigate these situations is that, as it happens, nature tends to provide what we need. How nice! So, we know that native Alaskans shouldn’t generally be eating watermelon – well, thank God, it’s like impossible to grow watermelon in Alaska, and it certainly doesn’t grow there naturally. And, thankfully, you don’t see any moose or any seals hanging out in Mexico. Instead they have fresh fish and lots of juicy, cooling tropical fruit. This is kind of why eating locally is a pretty smart idea, generally. Because God and nature are trying to provide the best for you. This general rule applies to herbal medicine as well. As a general rule, nature is trying to bring itself into a dynamic state of balance. If a region is very damp, you’ll find drying herbs there; if a region is very hot and dry, you’ll find cooling, moistening herbs there, and so on. Of course, no amount of prickly pear cactus is going to turn the desert into a rainforest, but nature wants to express itself and its infinite variation in a balanced and harmonious way. This is just like the human body; we don’t expect to be in perfect static balance for the rest of our life – the only way you could do that is if you were dead. Dead is static. Life is dynamic, ever-changing. We want to get into dynamic states, we want to get into a variety of interesting and novel and unique situations, but do so in a controlled and harmonious way. What do I mean? It’s normal to get excited when you first fall in love, it’s normal to have your heart race and to feel a little hot – this is one of the great joys in life – but it’s not normal to try to feel that way all the time. Your heart would explode! You’d have to quit your job and you’d spend all day writing love poetry! Your body wouldn’t be able to handle it. So we balance the “climate” of love, so to speak, with moderation and coolness.

The keto and Alaska thing is an easy example, because it’s an obvious relationship between hot and cold. But Chinese thought has an incredibly complex science of geology and geography. This detailed science allows us to predict and analyze the impact that specific climates and specific geographical features will have on the attributes of the region, the plants that grow there, and the people that live there. You might have heard of this science – it’s called Feng Shui. And there’s a whole lot more to feng shui than those interior design books would have you believe. It literally means Wind Water, because one of the main things it analyzes how the wind and the water interact with a particular terrain to produce the specific attributes of a region. So if a place is a certain way, that’s because of the attributes of the region where it’s located. So you would expect that the Feng Shui of LA is going to be profoundly different than the Feng Shui of rural North Carolina. Because LA and rural North Carolina are really different places, with really different people, and really different vibes, and really different climates. And, on a smaller level, you would expect the feng shui of a major city in North Carolina, like Raleigh, to be very different than the feng shui of a tiny, Appalachian hamlet like Little Switzerland. The feng shui of Raleigh is conducive to being a major city, the capital city of North Carolina. They didn’t just pick it randomly, they picked it because it was a good spot. And the Feng Shui of Little Switzerland just means that it wouldn’t make for a very good capital city. Rationalize it however you will, like “Raleigh is flat and Little Switzerland is mountainous,” but all of that geographical, geological, climate, soil, elevation, solar orientation information, all of that is included in Feng Shui in a systematic and analytical way; it’s just not the type of analysis that resembles Western geological analysis, even if the conclusions can overlap. So if feng shui has so much to do with the attributes of a region and what goes on there, you would also expect that, using the example from our last food episode, in the relatively common situation of having two neighboring vineyards with different qualities of wine, one having an excellent wine and the other a middle grade, that the feng shui of the excellent vineyard will be different, and somehow better, than the feng shui of the middle grade vineyard.

And just like Chinese medical theory seeks to understand the external and internal influences on the human body, Feng shui seeks to understand the influences on a landscape. So Feng Shui is like the medicine of the Earth. Through conscious choices, like pointing our house in such and such a direction, or building the path to our house one way and not another way, we can exert a measure of control of our geographical influences, and how they affect our lives. Like if your basement has a mold problem, and you dig a ditch redirecting the water around your house, you might be able to fix the mold problem. Fancy that! That’s literally an example of feng shui. In the same way, in medicine, we can make choices to offset our own natural tendencies, the influences of our climate, and the influences of other external factors. Because climate has a huge impact on our health, and how we operate. Like New Englanders and Alaskans aren’t cold and distant for no reason; they’re cold because the CLIMATE is cold. And tropical islanders are welcoming and warm because the CLIMATE is warm. So climate is really important for our lives, but we can always choose to modify ourselves in response to it. Our diet is one of the choices we can make that we can use to take control of our health, and change who we are and how we react to the inevitable fact of stress.

Alright, so diet, we have individual circumstances, social circumstances, geographical circumstances. What else?

Well, there’s economical reality. This is a tough one to get around. Like I have a lot of patients that would definitely benefit from a ketogenic diet. But for them, just like for most people throughout human history, meat is a luxury. They simply can’t afford to eat meat and avocados and rich, fatty foods all the time. Let alone organic avocados, and organic, grass-fed, free range meats. A big part of why rice is served at every meal in certain parts of China is because rice is really cheap. And it’s filling. People didn’t necessarily think that wheat, or rice, or barley, or whatever staple grain they had was “healthy.” It’s just because they needed to feed a lot of people relatively cheaply.

There’s another thing we need to consider in order to be able to craft individualized diets. This is one of the most important and obvious, but also one of the most foreign to our current thinking on food. And that is that there is a HUGE difference between a BALANCED diet and a THERAPEUTIC diet. What do I mean by this? Look at anti-cancer diets for example. People find that highly alkalizing diets are effective at treating cancer. Great. So what is, inevitably, the recommendation that they make? Well, they say EVERYONE should be on an alkalizing diet all the time. Which just isn’t the case. Acidity is part of life just like alkalinity is part of life. We need excitement, acidity, just as much as we need rest, alkalinity.

So a BALANCED diet is one that is effective at maintaining your individual status quo. Like, for the Alaska natives, their traditional diet is balanced for them and their climate. But a THERAPEUTIC diet is one that is inherently IMBALANCED. It wants to shake things up, change things around. If you have cancer, you don’t want to maintain your status quo, you want to change things, and you want to do so fast! Because when you’re sick, the scales are already tipped, they’re already out of balance, so we need to add weight to the other side to repair the situation.

And it’s not just the diet in general that needs to be imbalanced, it’s the plant and animals that we want to use. So for a DISEASED and IMBALANCED person, we want to use a DISEASED and IMBALANCED plant, so to speak. Grains, for example, are a nice balanced, neutral plant. They’re not too this, not too that, right in the middle. Perfect for maintaining the status quo. They require nice, even growing conditions, and they don’t do too well if you just throw them into the brambles and the wilderness and just hope that they grow. Their properties and their growing conditions need to be balanced. Mint, on the other hand, is deeply imbalanced. Imagine eating a whole bowl of mint leaves. It wouldn’t take long before you really wanted to eat something else. That potency of that mint comes from the adversity that it faces. Mint will grow basically anywhere, and, what’s more, the greater the hardship it faces, the more essential oils it will have, aka the stronger it will be. It’s true. I once worked growing hydroponic baby lettuces and herbs, and we tried growing mint. This mint had perfect, full spectrum light all day, totally climate controlled, literally air-conditioned, perfect nutrient balance bathing its roots 24/7. And guess what, it didn’t even taste like mint at all. It tasted vaguely like leaf matter, but that’s it.

So when the climate or the land is diseased in some way, AKA out of balance in some way, then these imbalanced plants grow in order to try rectify the situation. And we borrow these powerful, imbalanced plants to try to treat our own diseases as well.

Things like chili peppers, turmeric, spices, these are all really STRONG substances that we use to treat STRONG issues. I know what you’re thinking. What about Mexicans and their regular consumption of very hot chili peppers? What about people from Thailand and that face-melting curry? What about Indians and their buckets of spices that they eat breakfast lunch and dinner? Have they built up a tolerance, so that they can just take more of it than we can? Well, a lot of our taste in food has to with habituation, that is true. Like comfort food isn’t a particular flavor or attribute, it just happens to be whatever comfort food you had growing up. Like, when I’m feeling blue, I like mac and cheese and ice cream. But I have a Russian friend whose idea of comfort food is pickles and smoked fish. And her half-american kids, they like pickles and smoked fish too. Not exactly my cup of tea, but to each their own.

But comfort food aside, there is no exception, no tolerance to the energetics of food. Mexicans extreme consumption of peppers gives rise to the unique attributes of the mexican people. What words come to mind when thinking about Mexicans? Fiery, passionate, hot-blooded, intimate. For contrast, let’s take a look at England, a country whose cuisine has been totally lacking in spice for generations and generations. What are some words that come to mind? Placcid, serene, polite, distant. Definitely pretty different than Mexican culture. And they also have pretty different ideas of how to run drug cartels – the Mexican cartels pretty well match our stereotype; violence, women, conspicuous wealth. Houses that have tiger-pens, just for the heck of it. It’s not that the English don’t have drug cartels and drug trade, it just looks different. After all, the British were the primary means that opium found its way into China in the 19th century. FYI, China never had an opium problem, with thousands of years of history with the poppy plant, until the British got involved. It’s a very interesting part of China’s recent history, and Britain’s too. So what does a proper, polite, English drug cartel look like?  That cartel is the British East India company. Unified, proper, colonial, and marked much more by its paperwork and propriety than it is marked by sex and violence.

So our food can change us, and genetically influence who we are, and what our culture is shaped like. On the other hand, sometimes cultures emphasize certain foods because of an underlying genetic problem. For example, Persians, Iranians, have a very high incidence of heart and cardiovascular disease, relative to some other ethnicities. But Persian traditional cuisine has a tremendous amount of saffron, probably more than any other culture in the world, and turmeric. Both of these herbs are potent blood moving herbs, particularly for the chest and the heart. They’re also warming, so they warm the heart as well. So in order to offset the natural tendency towards Heart issues, Persian cuisine has developed to include foods that are medically appropriate, they include foods that treat disease into everyday life. You see the same thing with Italians. They are a hot-blooded, passionate people, especially Southern Italians and Sicilians. Tomatos are this amazing plant that cools the blood, and clears heat. They have some other properties that are often misunderstood, about how they’re nightshades and that’s considered bad, but we here in Chinese medicine know that nothing is good or bad, you just need to apply it properly, but that’s for another day. So what is italian cuisine probably most famous for? Tomatoes! Tomato sauce. Lots of it. Caprese salad. Lots of it. Bruschetta. Cool down that heat in the blood.

We can see that a culture’s traditional diet can go in one of two directions. It can exacerbate the effects of a climate, or it can alleviate the effects. Let’s take Sichuan province as an example. Sichuan province is a very, very wet, very, very humid, and oppressively hot part of China. It’s also a major herb growing region—medicinal plants love it there. So the question is, what do they eat in Sichuan province? The answer: lots of spicy food. And lots of numbing food—that’s food seasoned with Sichuan peppercorns, which feels spicy when you first taste it, but it’s actually a totally distinct sensation. It makes your mouth vibrate. It’s pretty bizarre, and I love Sichuan food for that reason. They also use a lot of garlic. So in the case of Sichuan province, the people there said, “hey, I feel way too damp. Let’s balance this out a little bit.” So their hot, spicy, damp-resolving food helps them deal with their climate by promoting sweating and moving stagnant fluids.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the Emerald isle. Mossy, beautiful, green and very wet Ireland. What foods do we think of when we think of Ireland? Potatoes, and corned beef and cabbage, obviously. But, this is a really important point here, all of those foods are introduced, and the reason they’re introduced is because of outside commercial interest. It’s really the British rule of Ireland that caused them to grow so many potatoes. And, even though Ireland became famous around the world for corned beef, the citizens of Ireland were eating almost none of it because the British rule was exporting it to everyone else in the world for a profit. So whenever we examine a traditional diet, we have to do a bit of archaeology. So what’s the REAL Irish diet? Well, if you look far back enough, there’s sources that say that the Irish are famous for eating one thing. Milk. They had milk, they had buttermilk, they had their famous Irish butter, they had milk fermented in a variety of ways, they had cheddar, they had fresh curds, they had old curds, they even had a weird thing called bog-butter, where you take your butter and you put it in a bog for some reason. You know, to acquire that nice, boggy taste. In short, they had a lot of fluid-nourishing, yin-nourishing, dampening foods.

So what do the Irish look like? Well, they have even, lustrous, milky skin. They have relatively indistinct facial structure—no harsh angles, everything smooth and soft. Everything has a suppleness and a thickness to it. From consuming so much dairy, they became kind of…milky. As the old saying goes, you are what you eat.

But we take this really literally in Chinese medicine. And if you look closely, you can see it. Take a look at children of immigrants. Easy example: first generation Asian Americans. Especially the ones that didn’t eat very traditionally at home growing up. First thing you notice—they look a lot more American than their parents did, even if their parents have lived here for a long time. And, something really obvious, they tend to be a lot taller than their parents. Sized more like the average American. Because, as we said, YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT, we can see that, over time, people’s bodies transform into different shapes based on their diet. People’s faces change. And I’m not just talking about fat and skinny, tall or short; remember, your bones are constantly growing and laying down new bone—they’re not static. Even your bones have cells that are alive and very active. So your bones change, your whole physical makeup changes.

Need more proof? Let me tell you about what happens in the small intestine. We all know, food goes into the stomach, gets broken down, that slurry goes into the small intestine, then there’s lots of little microbes, lots of enzymes, all kinds of things in your small intestine that break things down into microscopic little pieces. Somehow, this crosses over into your bloodstream across the wall of your small intestine, and it gets into your blood and goes to your liver, then the rest of your body. So how does it happen? Well, some of it just gets through, moving in between the cells. That’s right, the literal contents of your small intestine just enter your bloodstream. Your food, once it’s broken down enough, just enters your bloodstream. Other times, the body uses particular transport pathways to scoot the material through a cell first – like with larger stuff like amino acids. But still, your body has selectively scooted a chunk of your food into your blood. Your food literally becomes part of your blood, part of your body. So the old saying, you are what you eat, it’s very literal.

If you eat a lot of vegetables, like a vegan, you’re going to turn into a vegetable. If you eat a lot of pork, you’re going to turn into a pig. Is it any wonder that the cultures that eat the most lamb, namely, the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean, are the hairiest? We can take responsibility for our transformation, and decide who and what we want to become, and in what situation.

We in the modern age are in a unique situation with food. Unlike any of our ancestors before, we can choose to have a different meat each day of the week. We can have Indian food one day, Chinese food another, and Italian on another. This is a fascinating position, especially given all of this about food transforming us. If you’re Chinese, and you don’t want to be Chinese anymore, you can eat like an Indian and literally become more Indian. If you’re American, and you feel more at home in Italian culture, you can eat exclusively like an Italian, and become more Italian. If you’re really fiery and passionate, and you want to temper it, you can become a vegan. Or, if you’re lethargic and introverted, you can eat a carnivore diet with hot and warming spices, and you can become the life of the party. Next episode on diet is all about understanding your individual constitution, and consciously using your diet to change, or reinforce, who you are.

But I want to end with another experiment for you. Medicine is all about experimenting on yourself. Rather than having Indian one day, Chinese another, and Italian another, I want you to find a culture. Just try one out. I want you to eat three meals a day like an Indian person. Or like a Chinese person. And don’t just pick and choose from all regions of China; China is a big place. I want you to eat like you live in Sichuan province. Or like you live in Guangdong province. Commit to a culture, commit to a region. See how you feel, see what it does to your body.

Why would I tell you to do this? Because the thing that marks our current relationship with food, particularly our current relationship with health food, is this kind of aimless hodgepodge of ingredients. Like, “oh kale is healthy, and quinoa is healthy, and I like chicken, so I’ll just take those three things and put it in a bowl and say that it’s a meal.” And some people are fine with that, but other people, because of their ORGANOLEPTICS—that’s from the last episode on food—other people, because they’re using their taste buds to detect what’s healthy for them, they won’t eat that food. They tell themselves it’s healthy, but they can’t stick with a healthy diet because it doesn’t taste like food. And they’re right, to some extent. It’s just a bunch of ingredients in a bowl. Cuisine is what happens when humans TRANSFORM food into something greater. Like I was talking about last episode, cuisine is what happens when humans HONOR and REVERE their ingredients, and pay attention to their natural attributes, muting some and bringing out others. Like you can add mint to lamb, a very British thing to do, which would make it more cooling, or you could blast off and add tons of warming spices to lamb, a very Indian thing to do. And the difference between mint and hot curry is really the difference between what it means to be British and what it means to be Indian.

Culture and cuisine go hand in hand. A culture is a group of people trying to take care of themselves, and be good to each other, and grow together, and their cuisine is a reflection of that. What is drinking tea without having a Chinese tea-drinking ceremony, or a British tea-time? It’s just the leaves of a plant soaked in hot water. What is food without sharing it with your friends? What is street-food without that busy, lively, city street that you found it on? What is cooking if we don’t do it the same way that our grandma did? Or at least someone’s grandma. As I said before, a big part of a healthy relationship with food is our social relationships.  are inseparable. And what are we lacking in America? Any kind of culture. Any kind of community. Everyone is off floating on their own, putting kale in a bowl with quinoa and calling it an entrée.

So, I challenge you to start making a culture. Borrow someone else’s for a while, or get in touch with your own. Pick one and stick with it. Cook like you belong to a culture. Drink tea like you belong to a culture. Act like you belong to a culture. Get your friends involved if you can. Get your boyfriend involved. Get your wife and your kids involved. See what happens. See how it affects your health. The health of your body, your mind, your spirit. See what happens, and how it changes your life. I guarantee you, you won’t be disappointed.

That brings us to the end of this episode of Classic of Difficulties; next time, after you’ve done your homework, of course, we will get into the discussion of how we can better understand which cultures, which cuisines, which diets are best for YOU individually, constitutionally, genetically. Who YOU ARE right here and now. What you should be putting in your mouth. Trying to help you answer the perennial question: What’s for dinner? Be sure to tune in next time to catch that info and more. As always, keep asking questions, and stay difficult!