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Comment by 3pt14159

7 years ago

True, and I don't hate this guide from my government, but the sample recipes are eye-rolling.

https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-food-...

Like, guys. Why are we adding brown sugar and why are we stressing skim milk? What are we adding dried cranberries, which lack fibre?

I constantly feel like I need to write a website on how to be healthy. I'm a fit software dev with 11% body fat. I've held it for almost 5 years now, but before that I was just like everyone else. It's really simple.

1. Maximize fibre (i.e., fresh veggies, non-canned chickpeas). 2. Eliminate refined sugar / date / figs / dried fruit as much as humanly possible. 3. Maximize flavour (i.e., fat, spices, added berries) 4. Maximize protein 5. Minimize average effort 6. Minimum 15 minutes of heart pumping exercise per day. Ideally 1 hour or more.

This is easier than you expect. I make a chickpea curry or (mostly) vegetarian chilli in a huge dutch oven once a week. That's 10 meals right there. I bike to get around. Body weight exercise once a week, and that's basically it.

This whole fat vs carbs thing is a total red herring. Some carbs are great for you (resistant starch, both soluble and insoluble fibre) some are fine (lactose, glucose) some are shitty (fructose, sucrose). Some fats are great for you (omega balanced polys) some are fine (mono) some are shitty (trans), but we lump it all into fats vs carbs and no wonder the public is confused.

It's almost like the food guide needs to make recommendations based on the categories you outline, and have those added to the nutrition labels. Eg replace 'fat' as a category with 'omega balanced polys' and trans fat. Gosh, then even color code the nutrition label so show that the bad nutrition elements are in red.

Ie. make it easy for the consumer to pick up to food items in the grocery store and make the healthy decision between the two. As of now, I don't really think that's possible unless you study things like yourself.