Want to Live Longer? Don’t Try Restrictive Diet

We often hear about people engaging in restrictive diets. Many of these diets involve removing entire food groups, such as meat, fats and oils, or other major restrictions. In many cases, when people engage in an overly restrictive diet, it is similar to trying to wash their clothes without laundry soap. Generally speaking, restricting entire food groups from one’s diet is usually taking one’s health in the wrong direction. Rather than removing foods from our diets, what many people actually need is a wider variety of foods.

The main reason for this is because the human body is designed to require a vast complement of nutrients. Restrictive diets by definition restrict the body of many of the nutrients it is so desperately trying to obtain. Long term refusal to acquire the nutrients our bodies are craving actually ends up forcing people to experience the ills of nutrient deficiencies. Nutrient deficiencies typically are not a sign that your diet is correct, or even healthy.

Supplementing Nutrients

Perhaps one of the greatest dietary problems people put their bodies through today is this idea of restricting nutrients from their diet, only to spend a mass fortune re-supplementing their diets with the very nutrients they would otherwise get from the foods they restrict from their diets. Come to find out, it would be difficult to make a case that replacing the nutrients found in living foods with synthetic nutrients in a pill is the healthier alternative.

What many people fail to realize is that their body can tell the difference and knows when it is receiving inferior synthetic nutrients. In addition, singling out certain nutrients and taking them in high quantities is a very unusual way to obtain nutrients from the perspective of your body. Your body needs nutrients in their proper ratios, properly balanced with the other nutrients found in the foods you eat, because nutrients have a tendency to work properly when they are obtained with other nutrients they work in concert with.

In other words, as nutrition goes, it is generally best to strive to get nutrients your body needs from the foods you eat, rather than by way of artificial supplementation. There may be certain cases where a person needs a supplement, such as in the case of a person requiring regular doses of vitamin B12, because they suffer from a condition like pernicious anemia, but this is more often the exception than the rule.

Restricting Animal Fats

One of the great problems people are seeing today is the problem associated with diets that restrict animal fats, namely saturated fats. The modern diet food craze has left a trail of results, showing that the more people eat diet foods, the more obese the population tends to become. The major reason for this is because diet foods tend to replace the saturated fats with sugar, which does not burn as efficiently as an energy source.

Consequently, people find themselves hungry all the time, rather than satiated. When you put the saturated fats back into your diet, all of a sudden you find you can go much longer without needing to eat. Superior foods that are nutrient dense simply produce superior results. Consequently, foods that are nutrient and energy dense are simply going to produce superior results in your overall health.

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