The Grow Youthful Diet
Standard American / modern Western diet
What is a diet for perfect health at any age?
Avoid sugar and refined carbohydrates
Avoid oils made from grains and legumes
Value saturated fats
Grow Youthful Recipe eBook
References
Standard American / modern Western diet
The standard American diet is based around processed foods and drinks. These modern Western-style foods are sold in supermarkets, convenience stores, take-aways and fast food outlets. They are convenient, attractively packaged, potently flavoured, sweet and addictive, and apparently affordable. These packaged foods are also highly toxic and deficient in micronutrients. They cause both malnutrition and a wide variety of severe and debilitating diseases.
What is a diet for perfect health at any age?
A diet for total, complete health is:
- Nutrient-rich. It includes traditional foods that healthy people ate up until a century ago. These nutrient-dense foods are what humans evolved to consume over several million years. They include a Palaeolithic diet, and more recently, the foods that hunter gatherer populations consume.
- Non-toxic. Surprisingly, the most toxic part of a modern Western diet is not necessarily their food additives, chemical preservatives or their agricultural pesticides/preservatives, although they are poisonous and should be avoided if possible. The greatest toxic impact comes from the sugar (3), grains (especially wheat) and beans / legumes that most people eat today. Humans did not evolve to digest the protective plant toxins in grains and legumes, neither have any other primates (apes). Beans and legumes need long soaking and heavy cooking to make them (somewhat) digestible.
- Prevents pathogenic infections. The modern high sugar, grain-based diet feeds harmful bacteria, protozoa, yeasts and viruses that infect the gut, brain and every organ and gland throughout the body. To recover from a viral infection deep in the nervous system or brain, you need to keep a low and steady level of blood glucose. Viral infections in the brain cause depression, schizophrenia and a variety of other neuropathies. The most common viral infection of the nervous system is herpes. Unfortunately, the modern Western diet causes a continuous high level of blood glucose, with wild spikes after every meal or snack. In contrast, the Grow Youthful diet provides a steady and low level of blood glucose that starves rather than feeds pathogenic infections.
- Easy to digest. Every meal should feel nourishing and satisfying. Foods should never cause gas, reflux, bloating, indigestion, irritable bowel, intolerance, malabsorption, constipation, diarrhoea, allergies or any other digestive problems.
In summary, the modern Western diet / standard American diet that most people who live in every city around the world have to consume is: highly toxic; lacks most important micro-nutrients; encourages and feeds nasty infections throughout the body; and causes all sorts of unpleasant digestive problems.
Avoid sugar and refined carbohydrates
The modern Western diet is sweet. Sugar (especially fructose) is added to almost every processed food and drink.
As explained above, sugar is just empty calories. Only the pathogens that infect your body thrive on the sugar that you consume.
Sugar is a very recent addition to the human diet, only in the last century or so. Before that, very few people could afford sweet foods. Before refined sugar, heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes and many other degenerative diseases that are common today, were almost unheard of. Eliminating sugar from your diet results in rapid changes to blood pressure, blood triglycerides, insulin response and numerous other health markers. (3)
Refined carbohydrates are similar to sugar in their effect on your body. White flour and even whole grain flour are relatively recent additions to the human diet, with disastrous effects. Best to avoid grains (particularly wheat), and everything made from them (flour and everything made with flour).
Avoid oils made from grains and legumes
I said above how grains and legumes are toxic. The oils that are extracted from them are even more poisonous. Avoid these omega-6 polyunsaturated fats. (1, 2) They are the golden vegetable oils lined up in your supermarket. They include canola, corn, cottonseed, flax seed, grape seed, mustard seed, peanut, safflower, sesame, (all seed oils), soy and sunflower oils. Most of these oils are produced in factories using chemical solvents, high temperatures and pressures, and various chemical techniques to de-odourise and make them more attractive to their unsuspecting consumers.
These oils did not exist prior to being invented, mostly in the last hundred years. They are toxic and hard-to-digest, often causing indigestion / weak digestion. They are also responsible for a wide variety of modern degenerative diseases, particularly cancers, macular degeneration and diseases based around hormonal upsets (particularly estrogen).
Value saturated fats
Our early ancestors treasured animal fats, as do most hunter gatherers and untouched tribal or "primitive" people around the world, those who have not yet been exposed to modern Western foods. So the diet recommended in Grow Youthful includes saturated fats, which are healthy, delicious, and do NOT cause heart disease or make you fat (just the opposite - when used properly they help you to stay slim).
Coconut oil, butter, ghee, cream, tallow, lard, palm oil, goose and other poultry fats are all body and brain-friendly and may be used to heal depression and many diseases.
Natural saturated fats:
- Are essential for your immune system, and are necessary to both prevent and destroy infections. Cholesterol is used by the immune system to combat bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa, and without sufficient cholesterol your body is open to infection by pathogens.
- Are the precursor (building material) for steroid hormones, healthy cell membranes, and brain cells.
You cannot enjoy good mental and physical health without sufficient saturated fats and cholesterol. (1, 2)
This is exactly the opposite of what you hear on TV and from many old fashioned doctors. However, there are MANY scientific research studies that show that saturated fats are essential and healthful. Grow Youthful explains why the above diet is so effective, exactly what to do, and also gives you plenty of details and links to scientific research studies. (5)
For example, here is one of dozens of major studies which show that a higher consumption of dietary saturated fatty acids (SFA) is associated with a lower risk of stroke, and every 10 g/day increase in SFA intake is associated with a 6% relative risk reduction in the risk of stroke. (4)
References
1. Siri-Tarino PW et al.
Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease.
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2010 Mar;91(3):535-46.
2. Yamagishi K et al.
Dietary intake of saturated fatty acids and mortality from cardiovascular disease in Japanese: the Japan Collaborative Cohort Study for Evaluation of Cancer Risk Study.
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2010 Oct;92(4):759-65.
3. Robert H. Lustig, Kathleen Mulligan, Susan M. Noworolski, Viva W. Tai, Michael J. Wen, Ayca Erkin-Cakmak, Alejandro Gugliucci, Jean-Marc Schwarz.
Isocaloric fructose restriction and metabolic improvement in children with obesity and metabolic syndrome.
Obesity. Article first published online: 26 OCT 2015. DOI: 10.1002/oby.21371.
4. Zhou-Qing Kang, Ying Yang, Bo Xiao.
Dietary Saturated Fat Intake and Risk of Stroke: Systematic Review and Dose-Response Meta-Analysis of Prospective Cohort Studies.
Retrieved online 1 October 2019. Nutr Metab Cardiovasc Dis. PMID: 31791641 DOI: 10.1016/j.numecd.2019.09.028.
5. Marinka Steur, Laura Johnson, Stephen J. Sharp, Fumiaki Imamura, Ivonne Sluijs, Timothy J. Key, Angela Wood, Rajiv Chowdhury, Marcela Guevara, Marianne U. Jakobsen et al.
Dietary Fatty Acids, Macronutrient Substitutions, Food Sources and Incidence of Coronary Heart Disease: Findings From the EPIC-CVD Case-Cohort Study Across Nine European Countries.
19 November 2021. Journal of the American Heart Association. 2021;0:e019814.