What’s the newest thing I’ve heard regarding good nutrition?  2 days ago, it was Dr Barry Sears talking about the Zone diet – hormonally-balanced, anti-inflammatory foods.  And how does that fit in with all the OTHER stuff I’ve learned before now?  I’m still not sure.

I’m trying to sift through all the GOOD information I’ve come across (forget about the bad stuff I’ve already tosssed out).  It can be so confusing and contradicting, even while some of it makes good sense… how is that possible?

Let’s see, what am I trying to assimilate? What have I learned before, what methods have I tried to improve my nutrition and health?

My definition of diet is more about nutrition than dieting to lose weight.  I use the term diet here as what we eat, not a plan we use for losing weight.

First was dealing with pain and reproductive health issues – and that lead me to an elimination diet, resulting in a period of time where I ate no yeast, white or wheat flour or white sugar (nothing refined) and instead ate ancient grains and other stuff. (I wrote about it in a post a long time ago.)  Following my hysterectomy, the pain was all but alleviated and I slowly started introducing all those eliminated things back into my diet.  It was had to eat that way all the time, and I missed some things.

Then was the Blood-Type Diet – again, much of that made sense.  It just turned out that my sweetie and I are opposite blood types (I’m A, he’s O) and the list of things we’re both supposed to eat was very small.  It’s hard to keep up with that kind of plan – always having to cook different things for different people or sticking to a very small list of things we could both eat.  I’ve never been a short-order cook and wasn’t about to start.  We were both still careful to avoid our ‘avoid’ foods, knowing that we didn’t feel our best when we did eat them, but that’s about how far we went with it.

I found out along the way that I have insulin-resistance.  (A post on that was written before, too.)  So, the Curves Nutrition Plan and then the Insulin-Resistance Diet both helped with that, while I kept up with them.  And for the most part, those 2 plans, and The Diet Solution program which I was also able to get a copy of as another option for good insulin-resistance meal plans, all had similar information.  The information made sense, and didn’t contradict other things I had heard and learned in the past.

Now as I try to put it all together and decide what’s best for me and my family, I realize that info changes so quickly these days, and that we’re given SO much information that it’s amazing any of us can make sense of it at all.

For instance, soy was once suggested to me as something good for women’s reproductive health.  Now I’ve heard that soy isn’t good in your liver – it’s viewed as a toxin, and puts your liver into gear trying to process the soy, rather than processing the other toxins it’s supposed to be working on.  An over-busy liver doesn’t allow our bodies to process the rest of the things properly, leading to other health issues, including inflammatory and obviously endocrine problems.

Splenda has been touted as the next generation ‘good’ sweetener, with no calories and all the sweetening power, and safer than aspartame.  Aspartame gives me a headache and I have never liked the taste of other artificial sweeteners, so I stay away from them.  But Splenda was something I could get excited about, right?  I learned early on in insulin-resistance literature that artificial sweeteners cause an insulin reaction just like regular sweeteners do, and yet have none of the regular sweetener things for the insulin to attach to, so they can actually be worse for you than regular sugar.  And again, I just learned that that our livers see artificial sweeteners as a toxin.

Good proteins are supposedly found in milk and cheese – except now I’m hearing that unless it’s organic raw milk (i.e, not pasteurized) and organic small batch cheese that it’s really bad for you.  Definitely only the stuff coming directly from the farmer in a glass bottle – everything else is killing you.  Cow’s milk, especially.  Goats milk is OK, though.

Lentils are supposed to be good too – except sweetie can’t eat lentils according to the blood-type diet, and they may be high in pesticide residues?

Meat is a good source of protein, right?  Except red meat is so full of growth hormones and other stuff that you have to get organic grain-fed and only eat it sparingly.

What about eggs?  Eggs are an excellent source of protein, but have all that cholesterol.  But Omega 3 eggs fix the cholesterol issue, right?

Pork is out of our diet because 2 members of the family don’t digest it well, and end up pretty sick after a serving of any kind of pork.  I’m not sure the human body processes pork very well in general.

Veggies, of course, should be eaten in large quantities, but peppers, tomatoes and potatoes are not in my diet after finding out that I react to them (not exactly an allergy, but a neuro-toxic kind of response – like the symptoms described here). And veggies should always be organic, always….

Grains…. where do I begin with grains?  I was told to eat whole grain things while I was dealing with my pain issues, and then later discovered that it was likely whole wheat that was contributing to some of the pain.  Now we hear that whole grains are better (and grains other than just wheat), but sprouted grains are best, and ancient grains (spelt, kamut, quinoa, etc.) are even better.  Corn is a no-no since it’s been so genetically altered.

Anything packaged in plastic and processed at all is bad for us.

Even the oils that we think are ok, apparently are not.  One source says Canola oil is good, another says Olive oil (cold-pressed extra-virgin) is the only way to go, and another one says that coconut oil is the best – all because these are GOOD fats that our bodies need to be healthy and even to lose or maintain proper weight.

The Omega fatty acids are good, right?  I just heard on Dr Sears twitter party that Omega 6 is not a good thing for children (it decreases attention span), but Omega 3 is good.  What about Omega 9?  I don’t even have a clue!

I could keep going, for a long time… and I know you’ve heard many of these conflicting reports.  So what am I supposed to do with it all?

I must say that I agree with many of these things – things like: the more processed a food is the less good it is for you, and like: plastic and rubber packaging probably is leaching some not-so-good-for-us stuff into our foods, and like: eating more fruits and veggies is good for our bodies in lots of ways.  On the whole, we don’t eat a lot of junk foods or processed foods.  We don’t eat much candy to speak of, and the children rarely ever have sodas (sweetie and I will drink one from time to time).

But do I put coconut oil on the grocery list and stop buying olive oil?  Do I start growing all my own produce or spending an arm and a leg to buy everything organic?  We’ve got the meat thing covered, with my sweetie being a hunter and all – our freezer is full of venison at the moment, and wild game seems to be OK by most accounts (unless the animal has chronic wasting disease or something weird like that *sigh*).  But I’ll have to buy a goat and my own chickens, too, to keep up with my 3 growing children.

It just begins to feel overwhelming at times.  I want to eat well, I want to feed my growing children well, I want us all to be healthy.  And I know that many of the things we see in our modern society with convenience foods and such are not healthy, and worth speaking out about, and even changing.  But how do we begin to pick an area, or areas, to take a stand in?  Which one is the right one?  We’ve already drawn some lines in our house – no aspartame, no junk food snacks, very little red meat… when is enough enough?

And I haven’t even mentioned all the different kinds of workouts and fitness plans that somehow fit into all of this.  SHEESH!

I’ll probably just stick with what I know works for us as a family, while I try to assimilate the new information that keeps coming in.  What works is looking for that balanced meal combination that we all enjoy eating, and not breaking the bank to do it.  I’m a busy mom, too, so chicken nuggets will still stay on the grocery list, as well as our frozen pizzas for pizza night.  Maybe we’ll die faster and be a little less healthy than the “all organic” families and die slower and be a little more healthy than the “mostly packaged foods” families.  LOL!

That might just be the best I can come up with, somehow assimilating the info I have into a plan that’s manageable for me, for us.  And I guess it’ll have to be good enough – even if it’s not the very best.  Who’s definition of the ‘best’ would I pick anyway? The debate could go on and on and on…