Good Food Standards

We should choose foods by following 4 Good Food standards. We’re pretty picky about this: all the foods we recommend have to satisfy all 4 criteria. Not 3, not most…all. We’ll explain them in more detail in other chapters, buy here are the basics:
   The food we eat should:
   1). Support immune function and minimize inflammation.
   2). Promote a healthy hormonal response.
   3). Support a healthy gut.
   4). Promote a healthy psychological response.
Dallas & Melissa Hartwig, from “It Starts With Food”.

That’s from Chapter #3: “What Is Food?” in which we get introduced to the four criteria of the Whole 30 good food standards. Let’s take a quick look at each:

   1). The food we eat should support immune function and minimize inflammation. Inflammation is at the root of ALL disease. Therefore, we want to make sure our food choices are anti-inflammatory rather than inflammatory. Key culprits: grains, veggie/seed oils, dairy.

   2). The food we eat should promote a healthy hormonal response. Ludwig echoes this wisdom as well. He tells us: “Foods with similar nutrients can affect hormones and metabolism in profoundly different ways, determining whether we store or burn calories, build fat or muscle, feel hungry or satisfied, struggle with weight or maintain a healthy weight effortlessly, and suffer from or avoid chronic inflammation.” The Hartwigs walks us through how our food choices affect everything from insulin to cortisol. Powerful stuff.

   3). The food we eat should support a healthy gut. As we discussed in Clean Gut, it ALL starts in the gut. Alejandro Junger tells us: “Healing the gut is the single most important step we can take to ensure our lifelong health.” Again, certain foods are disrupting the health of our gut and we need to eliminate those toxic triggers!

   4). The food we eat should promote a healthy psychological response. Does the food we’re eating trigger an unhealthy psychological response? David Ludwig has tested this extensively and PROVEN that ultra-processed, fast-acting carbs light up your nucleus accumbens—the same “reward center” that lights up for people addicted to cocaine and alcohol. That would qualify as an unhealthy response. Which is why removing fast-acting carbs (sugar, pizza, bread, pasta, etc.) is part of his Phase I of: Conquer Cravings.