French Paradox, Mediterranean Diet, Okinawa Diet…Oh my!
How do you chose?
You don’t have to choose, you can enjoy them all.
All authentic cuisines the world over include foods that belong to these four categories:
- Meat on the Bone
- Organ meats
- Fermented and sprouted foods
- Fresh, uncooked ingredients
While most of my patients are aware of the importance of fresh foods, few people realize that we also need to include foods from the other three pillars. Here’s what you need to know about each:
Meat on the Bone
Cooking meat bone does two great things.
1) It enables the bone nutrients to infuse into the meat, imparting wonderful flavors.
2) Heat, water, and acid break down the collagen. When making bone stock (by boiling bones in water with an acid source, for instance tomato sauce) you fill the water with molecules called glycosaminoglycans. These molecules act as joint growth factors, keeping the collagen in your joints healthy and facilitating the repair of damaged joints.
I recommend you eat meat on the bone twice a week
Organ Meats
Recognize this? It’s liver pate. Few people are familiar with liver, kidney, bone marrow, and the other huge variety of offal meats that our ancestors universally enjoyed. I often hear people say only poor people eat this stuff and they do so because they can’t afford the “better” cuts of meat. I don’t believe that’s the whole story. It takes a good deal more culinary know-how to know how to prepare this stuff. Few people bother to learn the tricks. Why bother? Liver and other organ meats contain omega-3 and other essential nutrients most people are sorely deficient in!
I recommend you eat organ meat once a week
Fermented and Sprouted: Truly Live!
What are fermented foods? Yoghurt is probably the most well known food that still contains live bacterial cultures which you eat. These little critters toil and toil to turn simple nutrients, like sugar and cellulose, into amino acids and vitamins. They also are probiotic, meaning they are “good life forms” that keep on living inside you. While there, they fight off pathogenic bacteria and help prevent a wide range of infections. A few other commercially available foods still contain live cultures.
Sprouted grains and legumes are the counterpart branch of this truly living, most dynamic pillar of traditional cuisine. Thousands of years ago, the only way to transform hard kernels of wheat into dough for making bread was by partially germinating the seeds. Of course, the processed occurred naturally when seeds would absorb water during storage and begin to come to life. Today, thankfully, a few manufacturers take the extra steps to make bread the old fashioned way and to provide us with a variety of sprouted nuts, seeds, and more. As with bacterial fermentation, sprouting transforms a simple nutrient – starch – into more complex ones, including fiber, amino acids, and vitamins.
I recommend you eat sprouted and fermented foods five times a week
Fresh: The Benefits of Raw Food
One word: Antioxidants.
More than any other pillar, fresh food delivers a powerfull wallop of inflammation-fighting antioxidant chemicals.
So many people taking supplement powders that claim to reduc inflammation would get more bang for their buck if they just ate fresh food! Why? Because cooking and processing – and that includes the process of encapsulation into pill form – destroy antioxidants. Antioxidants are only useful before they react with oxygen. Afterwards, they are “burned.” While stomach acid can sometimes rehabilitate antioxidants that are only partially destroyed by cooking etc., you still need to consume fresh food once a day to get the antioxidants you need. (For those of you thinking you’d like to try Eskimo diets, you can get antioxidants from raw meat!)
I recommend you eat fresh food daily
There are many more benefits of Four Pillar Foods!
Once you start eating them, you’ll experience all kinds of health benefits, from reducing asthma and arthritis, to avoiding deadly cancers and heart attacks. And all of these have beneficial effects on nerve tissue – meaning they can reduce pain and improve memory!
(Deep Nutrition has over 300 references to support the statements made on this page.)
[...] You might be wondering why I buy so much meat “on-the-bone”. Well, first and foremost I find the bone imparts lots of flavor to the meat. And second, meat on the bone is more nutritious. To learn more about this, be sure to check out Dr. Catherine Shanahan’s blog about the Four Pillars of Good Health. [...]
Hi Dr. Cate, I have eaten nutritionally deep for over a year now, grain and sugar-free for five glorious months. I devoured your book and have dog-eared many pages. I’ve never been healthier or happier in my life, and even gained a half-inch of my height back, after losing an inch to degenerative spice disease. The thing is, I have high cholesterol. 289 total. I want to go back in for a fasting lipid panel to get the other numbers. Last June is was 263. My triglycerides were 44 though. Anyway, my doctor, though open to conversation, thinks I need to be on drugs. I wish he would consider all the information I have discovered through you and other wonderful sources, but I’m not going to bet on it. If you have any wisdom or advice I would be so so grateful. Thank you!
Oops. I meant degenerative SPINE disease. Now I wonder what degenerative spice disease is and wonder if Victoria Beckham has it.
Oh Posh, that’s funny.
the total number is meaningless, and any good lipid specialist can set your doctor straight on that. What matters most are the HDL and Triglyceride values, and the average cardiologist is going to focus on LDL even though it’s not really an independent variable. The higher your HDL, the better. And triglycerides under 100 are excellent. If your LDL is high, you may have some interference coming from reverse t3 as discussed here: http://perfecthealthdiet.com/?p=4457 and still I wouldn’t change your diet but some people feel better with naturethroid supplementation.
Dr. Cate,
Thanks for your response. While I’ve been processing all of this new information I thought of one more question/issue I have with your perspective. You discuss the fact that traditional food cultures are healthier than ours and you describe their similar attributes – one of these cultures being the French. So, my question is, how do you then explain the abundance of French bread, baguettes, croissants, and the myriad of French pastries made with white flour (and sugar) consumed by the French? My mother-in-law is French, in her late 70?s, makes the best French pastries, and gets around like she’s in her 40?s! I’m wondering if she makes them for us and then doesn’t eat any herself!
Thanks again,
Stephanie
Stephanie
The French are not entirely immune to the invasion of the carbohydrate! Before industrialization, wheat was far more labor intensive compared to hunting in the once-abundant forest lands. Now that only a tiny bit of forest remains in France, as with much of the rest of the world—having given way to amber fields of grain—the choices people have have changed. I see the baggetification of French cuisine as an artifact of the industrial age.
Dear Dr. Cate,
I’m a naturopath living in France though I’m Japanese and grew up in the U.S.. I absolutely agree with you about the importance of eating raw foods, fermented foods and meat on the bones (makes sense with regard to the GAG contained in bones). However, with regard to the benefits of eating organ meat, I’m puzzled about the preparation of such foods. Should one eat organ meat raw? Here in France, we are careful to have our patients eat sufficient omega 3 fats, but non oxidized and raw as they are transformed into transfats when heated. Also, what about all the vitamins, minerals and enzymes that are lost through cooking organ meats?
Thanks in advance for your clarification.
Mariko Harada
Practicienne en naturopathie
Cooking is unlikely to cause mineral loss, unless you boil and then drain off the fluid. I do understand that uncooked proteins are more nourishing because the amino acids have not been oxidized, while the cellular enzymes in the foods are unlikely to contribute in any way to our digestive process as they are de-activated by the digestive acids and our own enzymes. I discuss this as well as the reasons I believe are behind the health benefits of raw foods in chapter 7 of Deep Nutrition.