Fiber diet
Rules were made for man, and not man for rules.
- Mark 2:27
Per every 200 calories of food:
- May it include at least 2 grams of fiber
- May it not include more added sugar than fiber
|T|hese dietary "rules" are reduced from a few core principles. The first principle is a desire: eat to live versus living to eat.
If it were easy to live from light, air, and thought alone, I would. Alas, grave primordial hunger pangs do haunt me. I eat to satiate the woes of hunger and to stave off the habit of malnutrition — its dreadful symptoms of light-headedness and anemia.
Thus we chew and swallow that which is easiest.
Physician Joel Fuhrman wrote a book called Eat to Live that informed the justification for these "rules." He argued to be efficient with your calories, that legumes, fruits, and vegetables have more nutritional value per calorie than animal products. The fat from animal products inflates calories for little gain except protein.
The second principle is a desire to reduce toxic build-up in the blood as is noted in yogic texts like Swami Sri Yukteswar's Holy Science. Toxins build up from improper elimination resulting from improper eating, over-eating, and not eating enough fiber (an intestinal aid) while eating too much added sugar (an intestinal harm). If we eat properly we lower the standing demand our digestion makes on the heart. Fiber slows the stomach's emptying, so a meal reaches the intestine as a trickle and not a flood. The gut then asks for less blood at once, and the heart speeds up less to supply it.[Trahair LG, et al. "The Effects of a Whey Protein and Guar Gum-Containing Preload on Gastric Emptying, Glycaemia, Small Intestinal Absorption and Blood Pressure in Healthy Older Subjects." Nutrients 11(11):2666, 2019. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11112666] Conversely, food stripped of its fiber empties fast. Juice, soda, and white bread arrive in the small intestine all at once, the gut calls for a surge of blood to absorb them, and the heart quickens to deliver it. A heart that spends its days at a lower rate tends to be a heart that lasts longer.[Jouven X, et al. "Association between change in heart rate over years and life span in the Paris Prospective 1, the Whitehall 1, and Framingham studies." Scientific Reports 14, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-70806-8] Fiber helps keep our body regular in more ways than one.
Swami Yukteswar and Dr. Fuhrman argue, indirectly, for a vegan diet. However, eating adequate protein on a vegan diet is nearly impossible. Exacerbating this flaw is how satisfactorily protein satiates hunger.
Therefore, the true eat-to-live subscriber requires some moderation of animal products for their protein expediency. So it is that this fiber diet offers a balanced approach, eating animal protein alongside fruits and vegetables so that every 200 calories contains ample protein, vitamins, and fiber. May our food choices be efficiently filling and healing.
These two rules are made for man, designed to simplify life when walking the aisles of nutrition labels. Check the calories, check the fiber, check the added sugar. By no coincidence, foods that meet this criteria are also foods without overly processed ingredients.
These two fiber diet rules forge the dietary scythe that will cut through the noise of healthy or not, eat it or not.