10 Commandments for Healthy Eating

1. Thou shalt not eat canned soup

Commercial canned soup is mostly salt and fat and pretty much nutrition-free. Some soups with the words “chunky,” “hearty” or “healthy” in the name have less sodium and a few more over-cooked vegetables, but they are terribly expensive and not worth eating. The heartbreak of eating those canned abominations is that soup is so dead easy to make. Cut up three or four of your favorite vegetables (Don’t like celery? Leave it out!) dump them in a pot with some canned broth and some meat scraps, set it on medium heat and then go take your pet cheetah for a half hour walk. You’ll come home to something a hundred times better than what you could have gotten out of the most expensive can. Homemade soup keeps for a week in the fridge and is even better the second day.

2. Thou shall eat fruits and veggies.

This is everyone’s least favorite, right up there with not coveting your neighbor’s ox. The thing is, fruits and vegetables are the world’s original fast food. Trying to stay away from potato chips before supper? Have an apple! It’s fast, cheap and tasty. Not all apples were created equal. If you aren’t familiar with all the different kinds go to the grocery store and buy one of every kind they carry. If you end up with one that’s way too sour to eat, chop it up with a touch of sugar (or sucralose) and cinnamon and let it spend 3 minutes in the microwave. Eat it in front of someone so you can watch them drool.

3. Thou shalt limit fats

Sigh. Fats make things taste good. There’s no getting around that. It really doesn’t pay to be a low fat fanatic, though. You need some fat to process your fat soluble vitamins and to keep your skin from turning into philo dough. But, unfortunately, you don’t need much fat to stay healthy. Try out those canned spray-on oils. They are useful for more than stick-free frying. The butter flavored version can be very tasty sprayed on hot vegetables. The olive oil version can be good sprayed on a salad, which you then sprinkle with balsamic vinegar or lemon juice. If you like your thousand island and don’t want to give it up, have the dressing on the side. Then stick the fork tines in the dressing before you fork up a mouthful of salad. Try it, it works! You still have the taste of the dressing you love with less harm your body.

4. Thou shalt limit sugar

A commandment to eliminate sugar completely would have everyone living in hell. No need for that, but it’s a good idea limit sugar. Refined sugar is simply empty calories. It’s an urban legend that it causes diabetes, but it doesn’t do your blood sugar any favors. A can of soda has the equivalent of a about half-cup of sugar. I wouldn’t feed that stuff to a dog. Not even a stray dog that bit me. Artificial sweeteners may have their problems and you shouldn’t have a steady diet of them, but considering how bad refined sugar is, they are, on the whole, better for you–in my opinion. Sucralose is only one molecule off from “real” sugar (it actually is “real” sugar, check out the “ose” ending) and it’s the sweetener most likely to have the fewest side effects and none have been noted so far. Your body doesn’t know what to do with it and just passes the stuff on through without absorbing it. Future research may find some harm in it, but right now it looks like the most benign and inert of all the sweeteners. A word of warning about “sugar-free” stuff. Lard is sugar-free–get the picture?

5. Thou shalt eat fiber

This commandment is probably one of the easiest to keep–certainly easier than not coveting your neighbor’s sugar. A lot of really delicious things have good fiber such as a crunchy, crusty seven-grain bread, an apple, celery with a schmear of peanut butter, and even some of those high-fiber breakfast cereals are telling the truth when they say they taste good (some are lying through their teeth). Fiber is filling and hangs around in your stomach for a while so you don’t get hungry again too soon. If you are dieting, this is a Very Good Thing.

6. Thou shalt eat breakfast

Ugh. A lot of people just aren’t open for business first thing in the morning. That’s understandable. However, your mom was right when she said it was the most important meal of the day. She was wrong that it had to be a sit down meal of eggs, ham, toast, grits, fruit salad and a quart of orange juice. A stick of string cheese and half a whole wheat bagel is fine. A glass of milk and a piece of toast is fine. Most breakfast cereals are not fine. For most of them eating the box they came in would be more nutritious. If you can’t stand the thought of food first thing in the morning, hard boil a half dozen eggs and stick a couple in your pocket as you walk out the door in the morning. Eat them on morning break after you get to work. You can do the same with the bagel and string cheese.

7. Thou shalt not eat too much protein

This commandment gets broken the most in wealthy countries. Your body needs protein and you must eat it. The human body can make carbohydrate out of protein but can’t make protein out of anything. Your heart is made of protein. Do the math. However, this commandment is against eating too much protein. Too much protein is hard on your body and meat tends to be the source of most of the fat and cholesterol we eat. You won’t find any commandment against eating meat here, but you if you aren’t vegetarian, you should try to limit your meat meals to one per day and get a greater proportion of your protein sources from plants. Beans are delicious. Like apples they are not created equal, try all the different kinds. Unlike soup they are fine canned.

8. Thou shalt limit sodium

This is also a tough one, especially if you eat a lot of processed foods. There should be an entire separate commandment against eating anything that comes already prepared, but one must be reasonable. Like fat, salt makes things taste good. That’s why all the really, really bad foods are mostly salt and fat mixed with a little carbohydrate (think potato chips or cheese curls). If you salt everything before you eat it, stop doing that and taste it first. Eat a few bites and if you can’t stand it, add a tiny amount of salt and have a couple more bites. Taper off. Eventually stuff you used to think was good will be nasty because excessive salt drowns out the flavor. Trust me on this one. It will happen.

9. Thou shalt eat raw food

Cooking a lot of foods is fine. It kills bacteria, destroys toxins and makes some of the nutrients more available to your body. Don’t try to eat raw potatoes; they have a toxin that’s destroyed by heating. Ditto mushrooms. A handful of raw mushrooms on a salad is fine but a pound of them raw would be mildly toxic. Some nutrients in tomatoes are more available as tomato paste or marinara sauce. But for a lot of fruits and vegetables raw is the way to go. There’s no point to eating canned peaches, but your body will be very grateful for raw peaches. The same with spinach, carrots, apples, grapes, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, celery–you get the picture.

10. Avoid Dieting

Surely this one is blasphemy! Everybody wants to be skinny and if you are a pound overweight people behave like you are a slob. Dieting isn’t good for you. You can’t fool Mother Nature but you can make her really, really mad. If you go on a low calorie diet your body will shut down. It will assume you are starving and your weight loss will slow to a crawl. Not only that, but it’s tough to maintain a low calorie diet for long. We evolved to eat as much as we can whenever we can. With too much food available 24/7, we can go a little nuts. Add onto that the fact that most Americans consider hefting the television remote to be aerobic exercise and you have a recipe for weight gain. You must find an exercise you enjoy and do it often. If you hate to walk, bicycle. If you hate aerobics, swim. If all else fails, dance.

But above all else, keep thou these commandments.