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Originally Posted by JustBe
We are definitely, what we eat and how we move. There is a guy online who runs a great program. It makes sense in me that you can incorporate a lifestyle of activity through every day living. He holds some interesting views (he eats everything)which tends to tie into why many of our older generation who physically worked hard and often ate everything, lived a more healthy active life. I’ll find the video and post it..
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From my perspective, which is a sports performance perspective, there are ways to balance nutrients to optimise physical functioning. If a person takes an 'eat everything' approach, they will be able to lose weight, gain weight or maintain a constant weight just through their calorie balance, but will not be able to achieve a nutrient profile that meets their needs.
I don't want to sound too clinical because the body produces cravings for the nutrients it needs, and the most important thing of all is to be sensitive to the bodies hunger cues. The problem for most people is their cravings are overly skewed because they have been exposed to a food environment designed by marketers who only want to people to eat what they sell, and eat it again and again and again, like an addict. For example, energy drinks and cola include caffeine to induce craving, and coupled with high simple sugar content, that is a perfect recipe for inducing a 'food addiction'. The cravings for the 'drug' become much stronger than the body's craving for nutrients. As a result, in the modern food environment, what people crave is different to what they are hungry for, which is why 'eat everything' is different to 'eat anything'.
It is easy to tell a person what to eat to meet their personal goal of losing weight, getting strong, increasing endurance etc, but it is very hard to re-establish a connection with the body's actual hunger for individuals who have 'become addicted' to food. Re-sensitising a person to actual hunger is very tricky because you can't really tell an 'addict craving' from a 'hunger craving', but people can re-connect with their body and develop a good sense for what it wants the most, and then eat intuitively. The body will start to crave colours. It won't crave any sort of food, but start to crave a colour, green, red, orange, white, or a texture like crunchy, juicy, slimy, or what have you, and as long as you get such sensations from whole unprocessed food, like a crunchy nuts rather than a bag of doritos, for example, as the body will crave after food with high nutrient contents to get what it needs the most. That's more like intuitive eating - not the same as 'eating whatever you want'.
Then there is chaos thrown in about 'toxins', 'acidifying', and 'cleansing' and 'detoxifiction'. There are no dietitians who talk about 'detoxing, cleansing' and so on (if you find one who does, thay are probably selling supplements). And really, that sort of thing is mainly practiced by vegans who already supposedly have a perfect diet. It is, at best, an insignificant aside which distracts people from what is important, and thus does more harm that good.
So Grandma didn't know anything about nutrition except what to feed the feed the family so they grow healthy and strong. She didn't know a protein from a carbohydrate or what a calorie is. My Gram could barely read. Her husband had to read things to her. She just knew, give them a bit of meat, some colourful fruit and veg and a treat. When I learned about sports nutrition, it's the same as gram's food. I only learned why Gram was right all along.
On the acidification issue: The food we eat is metabolised and that creates 'metabolic waste', which is filtered by the kidneys the peed out, mainly. The waste can be acidic, alkaline or neutral, but it all equally 'metabolic waste'. If you eat 'alkaline foods', your urine will contain alkaline waste, and if you eat 'acidic foods', acidic waste - but it's all waste that the bidy has worked to filter out.
An alkaline diet is the same as a plant based diet, so when they say the 'alkaline diet' is better, it is, but that's because whole plant food is healthier, more nutritious, than the processed/packaged junk which is is 'acidic food'. Hence the 'alkaline diet' is a myth, but it's a healthy diet. I suggest eating more 'alkaline food', not because it generates alkaline waste products, but because 'alkaline food' is healthy fruit and veg.