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Welcome to HumanaNatura’s overview of the OurPlate natural eating model!

OurPlate is a simple but powerful dietary approach, and groundbreaking aid for more natural and optimal modern eating. It emphasizes whole and ecologically-sustainable foods, along with active personal exploration of our optimal portions and proportions of these foods.

The OurPlate model and graphic are from Mark Lundegren’s Our Three Natural Paths, and in all summarize essential ideas from the book’s chapter on Modern Natural Eating. Instructions for using the Our Plate model are included in the book, and the OurPlate graphic is distributed here for general use with permission from the author, subject to the book’s terms of use.

OurPlate is based on contemporary nutritional, agricultural, and ecological science, in conjunction with companion research examining our original human eating patterns in nature. In practice, OurPlate helps us first better understand and visualize ideal modern eating, and then create meals that are naturally delicious, easy to prepare, and optimally healthy for both us and our planet.

The OurPlate name was chosen for contrast with the U.S. government’s heavily promoted, but deeply flawed, MyPlate nutritional model. The names may seem similar, but the two dietary approaches are substantially different. This includes their basic orientation, breadth and depth of employed science, underlying nutritional principles, range of recommended eating practices, expected individual and environmental health impacts, and confirmable immediate and long-term personal benefits.

As you may know, the governmental MyPlate model proposes only minor adjustments in the way that people generally eat today, and therefore only modest changes in how food is typically understood, consumed, and produced. Because of this, adoption and promotion of the MyPlate method can be expected to produce little or only incremental improvements in our general health levels, except in cases of people with very poor diets.

By contrast, the OurPlate dietary approach involves a very different, far more natural, more informed, and reliably more health-transforming approach to modern eating. When used consistently, the OurPlate model can produce rapid and sometimes startling personal health and fitness improvements, and for people with average and even above average diets. Once again, this is all while fostering modern eating patterns that are readily made ecologically sustainable in time and for future generations.

As you can explore and validate for yourself, the OurPlate model and its underlying Modern Natural Eating principles and practices form a powerful, renaturalizing, and transforming approach to eating and overall personal fitness today. Using the OurPlate approach and its essential guidelines, even for a few weeks, you will find that OurPlate does indeed offer a new, simple, natural, and remaking way to organize your daily meals and lifelong eating patterns.

Learn more about OurPlate and optimal modern eating at Our Three Natural Paths, and expect lifelong health improvements from the approach!

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By Mark Lundegren

I am approaching several nutritional milestones or anniversaries. These include nearly twenty years experimenting with ancestral eating in various forms, three years of ketogenic eating within this larger experiment, one and a half years following a largely plant-free carnivorous or zero-carb regime, and one year of living almost exclusively on meat, fish, water, and salt (often called a pure carnivore diet).

My recent HumanaNatura post, Living On Meat & Water, outlines this last phase of my exploration of ancestrally-informed eating, and offers perspective on the approach from six vantage points: nutrition, enjoyment, ecology, ethics, practice, and economics. It’s a brief but good introduction to the key issues surrounding this apparently beneficial, but still controversial, way of eating.

Taking the idea of living on meat and water to its logical end, and in a practice still rare within the carnivore community, during my past year of pure carnivore eating, I also have cooked my meats almost solely with water alone – briefly steaming meat and fish in a covered pan – and have avoided other methods of cooking. I chose this approach to increase the nutritional and practical advantages of pure or minimalistic carnivore eating, and notably as an alternative to both the traditional cooking of meat and eating meat raw (as some carnivore practitioners do). Since the practice of steaming meat is generally overlooked and its benefits underappreciated, among omnivores and carnivores alike, I wanted to focus on this topic today.

The Benefits of Steamed Meat infographic above summarizes the basic procedure for steaming meat, again including fish, and then provides a listing of the key reasons why steamed meat may be superior overall to either traditionally-cooked meat or raw meat eating.

As you can see, the graphic’s main chart compares twelve nutritional and practical factors across the categories of raw, steamed, and traditionally-cooked meat (the latter a broad category, but with many recurring characteristics). Overall, the chart summarizes the important advantages that steamed meat can have over these other modes of meat eating. For omnivores and non-carnivores, I would add that these benefits track with similar advantages to steaming plant foods, again both in comparison to traditional cooking methods and eating many plant foods raw (especially plants high in lectins and other anti-nutrients that degrade when heated).

My infographic is fairly straightforward, so I won’t go through it point-by-point. But let me highlight three areas: 1) the low nutrient degradation and significant meat tenderization from low-heat, short duration steam cooking, 2) the meat surface disinfection and reduction in potential pathogens that occurs when raw meat is steamed, and 3) the great simplicity of steaming meats – allowing us to downsize our kitchens, and both prepare meals and clean up after them in minutes, as with raw meat eating.

Lastly, I want to touch on two additional topics not covered in the graphic. First is the taste or palatability of steamed meat. I often get this question or objection, and after a year, my responses now are almost always the same. Typically, I will say: “it tastes like meat, time after time,” “give it a try, it’s an easy experiment,” and “I haven’t grown tired of this way of eating in the least.”

The second topic is my personal health and fitness. As I said, living almost exclusively on steamed meat and fish is uncommon, and the approach is largely unstudied. In addition, optimal personal health measures are in flux and debatable in a number of cases today. For these reasons, I don’t want to make broad generalizations about my physiological health, other than to say that it appears quite good. In particular, and even though I am in my sixties, I have no health complaints, live an active and athletically robust life, and take no medications.

On the other hand, my personal fitness is something I can measure reliably, and know directly and immediately each day. After a full year of living on meat and water, I can say that I am unexpectedly and even remarkably fit and well, muscularly lean and physically untiring, and noticeably far calmer and more clear-headed than ever before. I also have found that I need significantly less exercise to achieve high fitness levels than when using other dietary approaches (I have tried all the major modern dietary regimens, and for at least a year each).

Based on my experience living on meat and water overall, and primarily steaming my meat and fish in particular, the benefits appear substantial, and I would encourage you to consider and explore the approach.

As always, I am happy to respond to your comments and questions.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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Additional Reading: Cooking & Nutrient Loss, Cooking Meats, Meat Digestibility, Maillard Reaction

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By Mark Lundegren

Living on meat and water. It may sound like punishment, akin to bread and water.

But what if I said that a diet exclusively or primarily of meat and water is the exact opposite? In this alternative, which you can easily explore and test yourself, meat and water are not a path of hardship or limitation. Instead, they are a means to new and more optimal natural fitness, flourishing, and even freedom – in our often denaturalized and over-complicated world, and as with modern minimalism or essentialism in general.

To help you understand why this opposite view may be the truth, I will summarize the case for a meat and water diet, and the simpler or more elemental lifestyle this commonly encourages. For this overview, I will approach the topic from six perspectives: nutrition, enjoyment, ecology, ethics, practice, and economics. And let me preface our discussion by saying that I have been living almost entirely on meat and water alone for several months now, after years of exploring many different forms of nutrition, and at the moment cannot imagine going back to any of these other ways of eating.

To clarify and also qualify our exploration of meat and water living, I want to define the term meat before continuing. Here, I will take it to mean the flesh of grass-fed and pasture-raised ruminant and similar vegetarian animals. And when I say flesh, I mean all parts of the animal. This includes protein and fat-rich muscle meats, and nutrient-dense organ meats and bone marrow. But for our discussion, since I primarily want to discuss an essentialist diet of meat and water, dairy products derived from these animals will not be counted as meat, even as many modern self-identified carnivores consume these foods.

Importantly, when ruminant animals – such as cattle, sheep, and buffalo – are pasture raised and thus fed a diet exclusively of grasses, legumes, and other cohabitating plants, this is not only natural in a historical sense, it also is a human system of agriculture that is both perennial or ongoing and polycultural or ecologically diverse. Because of this, it potentially is a fully sustainable form of agriculture as well.

After all, ruminant animals have lived abundantly on grasslands and in forests for tens of millions of years, before and since the rise of our species. And they did this sustainably, or in natural symbiosis or harmony with their environment, and notably in part because of health-promoting predation. In a similar way, wild fish harvesting and naturalized aquaculture also can be understood as natural and potentially sustainable, since this too is a perennial and polycultural food system, and fish harvested this way optionally may be included in my definition of meat. This is especially true when fish eat a natural diet, of course come from unpolluted waters, and are taken low in the marine food chain, since this is a naturally more efficient means of fish harvesting.

Following on this idea of the naturalness and common sustainability of perennial food systems, many other animal products, including ruminants raised unnaturally, can be understood as less desirable or optimal. In the case of omnivore animals, such as pigs and poultry (and bird eggs), this is partly because these food animals are often less nutritious for us than ruminant meat and wild fish overall. But more importantly, these animals normally must be fed human-cultivated grain and legume feeds to be raised at scale. The cultivation of these animals therefore is often indirectly damaging to the environment, in addition to being directly damaging when these animals are concentrated into small areas.

In contrast to perennial and polycultural ranching or fishing, human cultivation of grains and legumes for animal feeds is a system of agriculture that is not only inefficient, since we might eat these grains and legumes directly, but also one that is inherently annual and monocultural. Because of this, it is a form of agriculture not patterned on natural ecology and, unsurprisingly, one that is generally damaging to the environment and unsustainable in time (regardless of who or what eats the annual crops we grow). Let me add that the case against eating many carnivore animals is straightforward as well. Not only are their meats typically less nutritious and often unhealthfully lean as human foods, relative to ruminant meats and fish, but we again often might more simply, directly, and efficiently eat their food animals ourselves.

With this background, let’s consider a diet of meat and water from the six viewpoints I outlined:

> Nutrition – you may not be aware that there are people, including scientists and physicians, who recommend on health grounds not only a human diet that is principally carnivore, but one that is exclusively ruminant meat and water (with a bit of added salts to compensate for the typical lack of blood in modern meat-eating). Crucially, most advocate this approach to eating not as a study in the fact that we can do this, but that we should – if we are to fully optimize, renaturalize, and ancestralize our modern diets, nutrition, and health. Such so-called pure carnivore eating, like carnivory more generally, is of course controversial today, but it is also a way of eating that is almost wholly unstudied as well. And while the approach plainly goes against contemporary nutritional guidelines and social norms, pure carnivores routinely report marked satiety and reduced eating overall, vibrant or unprecedented health and well-being, superior physical fitness, and enhanced psychological calm and clarity, . In my own case, after following a fairly strict pure carnivore diet for several months, I appear to be at a level of general health and fitness unequalled before in my life and with the various nutritional regimes I have tried (including vegan, vegetarian, paleolithic, and omnivore ketogenic). In any case, a diet of grass-fed meat and water, including organ meats and adequate salts, instructively and perhaps tellingly is nutritionally complete, and contains all the essential nutrients that we require as human beings (including Vitamin C).

> Enjoyment – a common response to the idea that a meat and water diet is either natural, nutritionally complete, or optimally healthy for us, beyond disbelief, is the idea that the approach seems unbearably dull or monotonous, and leads us to miss out on the many foods and flavors that make eating enjoyable. While I hear this frequently from non-carnivores, notably I rarely hear it from carnivore eaters and have never heard it from a practicing pure carnivore. In my own experience, a meat and water diet is perfectly satisfying and highly satiating, meat is deliciously meat day after day, and I never long for other foods. Importantly, a meat and water diet naturally gives us abundant calories and nutrients in a small amount of food. As a result, we tend to eat less food and less often than non-carnivores – once or twice a day, with no snacking, is common. And in this way, the place of food and eating naturally becomes a less prominent and occupying part of our daily lives. Personally, I average about 30 minutes a day in shopping, cooking, eating, and cleanup, saving perhaps an hour per day compared to other diets, and I relish my newfound time and freedom from both hunger and needless eating. I should add that I also fast regularly and effortlessly, can go days without eating if need be, rarely plan my activities around my need to eat, and overall find this way of eating has opened me to more of life’s pleasures and opportunities. But I still enjoy and even relish my meals, and meat and water eating overall.

> Ecology – I’ve partly covered this topic in my definition of meat and overview of perennial agriculture, which again is a basic approach to food production that is entirely natural, generally ecologically aiding, often regenerative, and potentially fully sustainable. To recap, when ruminant animals are raised via perennial and polycultural agriculture – whether in pastures or forests – this system of agriculture substantially replicates the original natural environment of these animals. This is in contrast to the monocropping of annual plants, whether for human consumption or animal feeds, which comprises a large portion of modern farming and often a majority of the foods we typically eat. Unlike perennial food systems, monocropping is a system of agriculture without analog in nature, one that causes high soil disturbance and erosion, unnatural water runoff, and land aridification and desertification. Instead of this, perennial agricultural systems tend to: 1) increase water retention, 2) preserve and build native soils, 3) increase plant cover and photosynthesis, 4) reduce reflected sunlight and heat doming, 5) eliminate the need for fertilizers and pesticides, 6) reduce atmospheric carbon and ocean acidification, 7) aid species diversity, 8) promote natural weather patterns, and 9) increase hydrological cooling of the planet. Contrary to popular pronouncements, modern-day ruminants raised on healthy pasture and forest floors naturally sequester rather than release carbon, notably by building new soil, as they have for tens of millions of years. If you would like to explore these ideas, see Design for Planetary Health.

> Ethics – the ethics of meat-eating seem simple and clear-cut to some, often leading to ethics-based veganism today. But as we delve the topic, we quickly find subtlety and ambiguity. For brevity, I will focus on deaths of sentient animals from different forms of human agriculture. As such, I will overlook the mistreatment of animals, which appears categorically unethical and normally is illegal. I also will not consider various hardships inflicted on agricultural workers, which of course appears highest in the case of foods that must be laboriously harvested by hand. To consider relative animal death rates, I will make two instructive comparisons, understanding that others are possible. One comparison is perennial polycultural ranching versus monocrop annual farming, and the second perennial polycultural ranching versus natural or wild conditions. In perennial polycultural ranching, ruminant animals plainly are slaughtered for food, on the order of one animal per year for every two hectares (five acres) of land. In addition, these animals and their handlers are likely to step on or otherwise kill several thousands insects per hectare per year. However, other species, such as birds and small animals, normally are unaffected by perennial ranching, and even may benefit from the increased land fertility and biological diversity it can foster. By contrast, in the case of monocultural farming, the situation is almost completely reversed, good and bad. No livestock are slaughtered fro food, but there is massive displacement of native ecosystems from these agricultural activities, the common use of pesticides, and frequent necessity of other pest control measures. The result is death on the order of scores or hundreds of small animals and birds per hectare per year, along with millions of flying and burrowing insects. Perhaps unintuitively at first, the case of land left natural or wild returns us to conditions quite similar to perennial ranching, since this form of agriculture is so natural. In wild conditions, both larger and smaller animals are subject to natural predation and death, and all animal birth and death rates naturally equalize in time as niches are filled. In addition, these ecosystems often naturally lose biological activity and robustness when top predators are removed or over-hunted. With these ideas in mind, you can see that ruminant meat-eating is ethically on par with wild conditions, and may be morally superior to diets making extensive use of annual monocropping.

> Practice – my photo above may have led you to suspect that meat and water nutrition isn’t only a description of the foods we might eat, but also of how we can cook meat too. In practice, lightly boiling and steaming meat in water offers a number of advantages over other forms of cooking, and also over the practice of eating meat raw, as some carnivores do. Notably, the approach: 1) cooks at a relatively low temperature, 2) minimizes nutrient and fat loss, allowing comparable nutrition with less food, 3) at once disinfects and tenderizes meat, 4) in no way impairs the taste of meat (it even improves the flavor of some meats, such as liver), 5) uses minimal energy and equipment, and 6) requires modest clean-up after cooking and keeps kitchens clean far longer overall. If you haven’t tried water-cooked meat, you should, since it arguably is the best way to prepare meats of all kinds. Depending on the size and type of meat, and how deeply you want the meat cooked, the practice of cooking meat in water takes minutes and is almost foolproof. For a 0.5 kilogram (16 ounce) steak, butchered roast, or marrow bone, 90-150 seconds of simmering/steaming per side  – in a covered pan with about a half centimeter (quarter inch) of water – will leave the meat very rare, moist, warm throughout, minimally degraded, very easy to eat and digest, and delicious (it will taste like meat). Thin slices of liver, by contrast, normally are cooked in 30 seconds or less on each side. When cooking this way, I usually bring water to a boil in my cooking pan first, add the meat, cover and set my timer, repeat on the other side when ready, and serve the meat or marrow bone immediately and lightly salted. As I said, cooking meat with water is easy and you will quickly learn to cook this way for optimal taste, nutrition, and practicality. And on the topic of water, I drink whenever I am thirsty, and this usually works out to about two liters (65 fluid ounces) per day.

> Economics – I have described the simplicity of cooking meat with water, our typical need to eat only once or twice a day on a meat and water diet. and the unprecedented fitness, vitality, calm, and sense of personal freedom or autonomy that many people report when eating only meat and water. Add to this food costs that are comparable to other forms of health-conscious eating (the meal in the photo cost $10 and was all I ate that day), and our discussion should suggest there may be new economic benefit or freedom waiting in meat and water eating as well. This is a very personal topic, but consider the small size and simplicity of the kitchen you would need to lightly boil meat for yourself and your family, once or twice a day. No elaborate equipment, no oven, perhaps only a small refrigerator, sink, single or double-burner stove, and a pan or two. And with this lesson – and especially feeling strong, naturally complete, and at your best from this essentialized way of eating – consider how many other rooms, and things in them, you might need to live richly and happily. Again, this is quite personal. But the daily lesson of simplicity, essentiality, and freedom that comes from not just surviving but thriving on a diet of meat and water is powerful. You would not be the first person to take this lesson out of their meals and across the totality of their lives.

Whether you are a practicing carnivore today or not, I hope I have inspired and equipped you to experiment with this at once new, old, reliably revitalizing, and profoundly simple way of eating, and then living. The only thing I would add is that the transition to meat and water living is a transition. It is easier if you are generally healthy, and begin from a healthy and especially ketogenic diet. But expect new learning, adjustment, and the need for a bit of persistence at first, and in all cases.

Based on my experience and learning from others following a meat and water diet, it is usually a month of change and challenge, but also of increasing understanding and vitality too. Then, for many, the way is clear to a new, more natural, and more vital personal state of modern health, fitness, ecology, clarity, and life.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

You are likely aware that our current state of nutritional science is at best fair, with a growing set of newer studies casting doubt on established nutritional guidelines.

For example, there are new questions about the wisdom of diets high in carbohydrates and even plant fiber. Similarly, researchers have begun to challenge the advisability of widely-adopted eating programs that encourage meals low in fats, low in meats and proteins, accepting of modern vegetable oils, and agnostic toward processed foods.

Supporting this scientific reversal, recent decades have witnessed growing health problems around the world, many likely driven by our current nutritional standards. An obvious list includes runaway obesity and diabetes, increased cancers, elevated autoimmune and neurological disorders, and reduced physical vitality overall. Often less appreciated is the fact that all this comes amid growing ecological problems from the industrial farming that supplies our typical modern diets. Here, direct and crucial effects include deforestation, habitat loss and displacement, soil erosion and desertification, species extinction, and increasing non-renewable agricultural inputs.

Against this backdrop of uncertain science, and flagging personal and ecological health, there has never been a better time to consider our natural or ancestral human diet. After all, since we are a long-evolved natural species, this diet should be generally beneficial for us and the environment, even if modern science might improve upon it, eventually.

The above Natural Food Pyramid infographic summarizes our ancestral diet, and outlines why this overall approach to eating is apt to be quite healthy, and even optimally so, for both us and the planet. As you can see, this renaturalized food pyramid is very different from ones produced by various government agencies and researchers since the 1970s, in its conclusions and also because it puts our most important foods on top!

Since the Natural Food Pyramid graphic contains ideas that may be unfamiliar or controversial, let me offer a few comments to explain its five food categories and key ideas:

> Pastured ruminants, plus wild animals & fish – ruminants are grass-eating and grassland-dwelling animals. Along with other animals and fish, they are our primary ancestral food and calorie source, and instructively provide a nutritionally complete, balanced, and perhaps optimal diet for us. Ruminants such as cattle and sheep often have a bad reputation ecologically. But as an ancient human food source, the truth is that these animals can be pasture-raised in ways that are entirely natural and beneficial. In particular, the approach can be polycultural or ecologically diverse, self-fertilizing, pest resistant, soil improving, water conserving, carbon neutral or sequestering, restorative to stressed grasslands, ecologically sustainable, and beneficial for rural communities.

> Perennial organic fruits & nuts – these are also foods that we ate naturally or ancestrally, though secondarily and often only significantly when meat and fish were unavailable. Reflecting their natural second tier status, fruits and nuts are often nutritious but are not nutritionally complete. In addition, many people can eat only limited amounts of these foods without experiencing inflammation and related metabolic effects – ranging from mild intestinal bloating and discomfort to chronic autoimmune and systemic health issues. Ecologically, since these foods typically are from perennial or regenerating plants and trees, the production and harvesting of these foods normally does not result in soil erosion, though other environmental effects (such as unsustainable water use) will depend on the type of plant and manner in which it is grown. However, since these plants normally are grown in clusters and not integrally in the environment, as with pastured and wild animals, they are often ecologically displacing.

> Annual vegetables & crops – these generally are newer human foods, many of which first entered our diet in the run-up to and during the Agrarian Revolution, 10,000 years ago, though our ancestors plainly ate some amount of vegetables and starchy plants before this (but limited grains and legumes). Nutritionally, these foods are often similar to fruits and nuts, in that they provide incomplete nutrition and bring risks of inflammation and related effects (though these risks may be greater in this category of foods overall). More significant instead are the ecological health differences between the two categories of plant foods. As with modern fruits and nuts, vegetable foods and staple crops are normally grown in large single-species or monoculture tracts, in a practice called monocropping. But unlike both pasture-raised meats and perennial fruit and nut farming, most vegetables and crops are planted and uprooted annually, resulting in compounding soil disturbance. As a result, these foods are generally far less ecologically sustainable than the above pasture, polycultural, wild, and perennial foods. Key ecological issues from annual vegetable and crop farming include soil impairment and erosion, water runoff and aquifer depletion, carbon de-sequestration, use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers, displacement of local species and ecosystems, and homogenization of our food system.

> Annual-fed animals & fish – these animals are ancestral human foods, but ones raised unnaturally on annual and monocrop foods such as soy and corn. Overall, while the resulting human foods are nutritionally complete, they are also often imbalanced (for example, with altered ratios of fatty and amino acids, hormones, and minerals). While these nutritional issues should be of concern, once again the main shortcoming of these foods is ecological. In essence, they at once share and magnify the ecological issues of annual vegetables and crops raised above. This magnification owes to the fact that animals naturally consume much more food than they produce. As such, annual-fed animals and fish are not only ecologically harmful because of their annualized diets, they are ecologically in efficient too, since we might eat at least some of their foods directly (though not necessarily beneficially).

> All processed foods – most of these foods come in a box or container, have been processed or produced in a factory, are derived from annual agriculture, and involve significant unsustainable resource inputs and accumulated wastes. As this description suggests, they also normally are the newest, least natural or ancestral, and least health-certain group of foods in the pyramid. For this reason, they are best broadly avoided.

These proposals may make perfect sense, or they may seem questionable and against what you have been led to believe. In any case, I hope they will provide useful perspective on the ways you do and might eat, and again from both nutritional and ecological vantage points.

However, regardless of your initial views about my infographic, let me close by highlighting that its nutritional proposals are readily tested. With your physician or dietician’s approval, eating primarily or exclusively from the top of the Natural Food Pyramid, even for as little as a month, will often have dramatic restorative effects on our health and well-being – reflecting the naturalness and general optimality of this overall diet.

If you are intrigued, I would encourage you to explore more natural modern eating, and then perhaps, more natural approaches in other areas of modern life too.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…encourage modern natural life & health!