What Color is Your Diet?

by David Heber, MD, PhD

The American diet is overwhelmed with the colors: beige and white. With this colorless diet, Americans have become increasingly prone to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and chronic pain. Dr. David Heber, the director for the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, would like to steer people in the direction of a more colorful diet. Color represents diversity and here is what he says about the importance of a diverse diet in his book, What Color Is Your Diet:

Certain genes that evolved in another long-ago era have programmed our bodies to expect a diverse array of plant foods that we no longer eat. This imbalance will turn out to play a key role in promoting chronic diseases, including heart disease and cancer, in genetically susceptible individuals.

Just to think about how the American and world diet is evolving rapidly away from what we used to eat as hunter-gatherers to what we eat now with an agricultural-based food supply. The concept of matching our diet with what are genetics are built to handle is very profound. Dr. Heber points to further demise of our diet with the promotion of the USDA food pyramid which he calls “a prescription for obesity”. The USDA promotes grains and starches as the base of the pyramid. That may promote profits for US agriculture; but does nothing for our health. Dr. Heber promotes a pyramid based on vegetables and fruits. A rainbow of colors is found in a healthy diet based on fruits and vegetables. A healthy diet is founded on the consumption of fruits and vegetables because we have evolved and thus are built to eat fruits and vegetables. So, next time you look at your plate or grocery cart ask yourself: “What color is my diet?”

For anyone interested in evolving towards a healthier diet, reading What Color is Your Diet can get you on the right platform to launch into feeling better.