HumanaNatura

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An advantage of reducing red meats, and emphasizing potentially healthier fish and eggs for protein, is that when we do have meat, it can be an extra-special treat. This is especially true when we eat the HumanaNatura way and follow HumanaNatura’s OurPlate healthy eating guidelines, and today’s showcase meal, brimming with healthy foods and nutrients, is a delicious case in point. Check out the sample meal photo and instructions below to learn more, and be sure to subscribe to follow our healthy nutrition and other natural health posts!

Please note that today’s HumanaNatura meal iis proportioned for both ketogenic (very low carb) and OMAD (one meal a day) eating – with about 2000 calories and over 70 percent of them from fats. However, options are included in case you eat non-ketogenically and/or more frequently than once a day.

Our meal begins by gently sautéing several cubes of grass-fed lamb on medium-high heat with a tablespoon of butter, a bit of minced garlic, and a dash of black pepper. When the lamb is nearly done, a generous handful of shredded cruciferous vegetables (available as a prepared mix at our local market) is tossed in and allowed to cook for a couple of minutes, and then the cooked portion of the meal is allowed to cool slightly. As the lamb and veggies cook, a generous raw salad is prepared to one side of a plate with fresh arugula, a large cubed avocado, coarsely diced cucumber, and sliced red and green bell pepper. When ready, the cooked foods are plated to the side of the salad, and the whole meal is topped with olive oil and white wine vinegar, raw sunflower seeds, raw pumpkin seeds, raw pecan halves, an optional shake of nutritional yeast, black pepper, and parsley flakes. This naturally rich, abundant, and compelling meal is then served promptly.

Options: For a non-ketogenic version of the meal, eliminate the butter, reduce the avocado and/or seeds and nuts by half, and replace them with with berries and/or a bit of cooked sweet potato. If you eat more than once a day, the meal of course easily can be scaled down for fewer total calories. And if you require more calories, the meal can be made larger by adding more vegetables, and more calorie-rch by adding extra avocado or lamb, or some grass-fed cheese. In all cases, we hope you enjoy this beautiful, healthy, and inspiring meal!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals like this via OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s simple natural eating guide for designing optimally healthy modern meals. Experience how this science-based and 100% natural approach to our daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Sharpen your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy Salad Meals via our Salad Meal Overview. And explore the science and key principles of optimal Natural Eating through HumanaNatura’s comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, you can explore your many opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – via HumanaNatura’s comprehensive four-part system for modern natural life and health. Check out the overview of our free health programs and resources at About HumanaNatura.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…give the gift of modern natural life!

Visit HumanaNatura          Follow Us on Facebook and Twitter

By Mark Lundegren

I have a fairly simple but far-reaching proposal for you – to stop eating monocrop foods, entirely and for good.

Today, this is plainly possible, if with one caveat. And although, or rather because, the move is countercultural and sweeping on many fronts, it arguably is the single most important step we can take to improve the ecological and personal health of the way we eat, now and forever.

Let me briefly explain the what, why, and how of moving to a monocrop-free diet, so you can consider if the change is right in principle, and right for you.

As you likely know, monocrop agriculture is one of the core features and indeed prides of human civilization to date, and was at the foundation of our Agrarian Revolution roughly 10,000 years ago. This development of course eventually made possible advanced civilization, science, and now modern life, even as it ironically and continually threatens each of these things.

In monocrop agriculture, and as the name indicates, single plant species – such as the staple crops wheat, corn, or soy – are grown monolithically and typically at scale. This can be done repeatedly with a single crop species, or via a series of revolving and chemically complementary crops. In monoculture farming, or monocropping, the agricultural plants used are normally fast-growing and repeatedly-planted annuals, or perennials grown as annuals.

Overall, the benefits of the approach are increased planting and harvesting efficiency, and greater edible plant density under cultivation. Owing to this, early and now modern monocrop farming tremendously increased agricultural yields, is the mainstay of the way people have eaten for centuries, and is the basis of most of the foods you will encounter in your local supermarket. This includes most plant foods, nearly all processed foods, and even many animal products, since most are now substantially raised on monocrop diets.

However, monocrop agriculture is not all benefits or upside, and free of costs or downside. As you may understand or just noticed, it is a practice unlike and even antithetical to natural plant ecology and larger natural ecosystems, and thus natural human food systems too. In wild nature, diverse mixtures of plants, animals, and microorganisms normally grow and evolve together in polyculture, and usually in persistent and synergistic guilds or interdependent systems, importantly with soils sheltered and left undisturbed. This ecological diversity of course is naturally selected and thus changes over time, but at any point normally aids the health or resilience of each participating species, as well as the soil fertility (or water fertility in marine ecology) upon which all species naturally depend, including our own.

Lacking these essential qualities of natural ecosystems, traditional and modern monocrop food systems have a number of unfortunate but foreseeable drawbacks. Foremost, they tend to assault and quickly diminish soil health, and in turn reduce natural soil fertility. This necessitates costly soil replenishment from either inorganic or organic sources, broadly impairs the nutritional quality of foods, and releases soil-sequestered carbon into the atmosphere. Related to this, monocrop systems also greatly increase soil vulnerability to wind and water erosion, and also ultraviolet radiation, in all cases promoting soil loss and desertification. In fact, many once fertile areas in the pre-modern world are now deserts, owing to the effects of earlier monocrop and other ecologically damaging forms of human agriculture. And today, vast areas of the world, and the societies they feed, are now threatened by unnatural or impermanent agriculture, and these practices are likely to prove unsustainable without a basic change in our approach.

Importantly, while reduced soil health and its ensuing effects are the most important adverse consequence of monocrop agriculture, and therefore monocrop eating, they are not the only ones. Monocrop plants are naturally more exposed and susceptible to pests, requiring the use of pesticides and other mitigation strategies, and today incentivizing the use of more pest-resistant, but ecologically and health uncertain, genetically modified organisms (GMOs). And beyond increasing pest populations and introducing pesticides and their greenhouse gasses into the general environment, monocrop agriculture is also harmful to natural ecological systems on other notable fronts. These effects include displacing natural plants and animals, introducing new species to local areas, imbalancing natural ecosystems, increasing water runoff and reducing groundwater recharging, and depleting or corrupting remaining water resources.

Lastly, and closer to home, monocrop farming not only can result in poorer nutritional quality in the foods we raise and eat, via soil impairment and reduced plant vitality, it can and in fact already has unhealthfully shifted our diets in favor of foods more readily grown in monocrop systems. This includes our elevated use of historically novel or unnatural, carbohydrate-rich, metabolically and hormonally-distorting, inflammatory, and antinutrient-abundant staple crops, along with increased reliance on processed and animal foods derived from these crops.

Of course, not all human food production is based on monocrop agriculture. In a number of crucial and instructive areas, our food supply is polycultural, guild-based and synergistic, natural or naturally-modeled, naturally fertile and productive, soil and water protecting, pesticide-free, carbon-sequestering, and potentially fully sustainable in perpetuity. Key examples of these natural human food systems include: 1) the world’s wild and wild-farmed fisheries, 2) human grassland and pastoral agriculture in its many forms, 3) perennial silviculture or tree-based agriculture, especially in combination with complementary plant and animal guilds, and 4) other polyculture food systems, notably including food forests and sea plant harvesting. Crucially, these and other non-monocrop food systems offer a natural and resilient model for human agriculture and economics, today and for the future, and a path forward to superior human health and sustainability.

As I said at the start of my proposal, the move to monocrop-free eating (MFE) and monocrop-free agriculture (MFA) is not only desirable today, it is entirely possible and even quite easy. To achieve this goal, we need only migrate our diet to foods from the polycultural and sustainable food systems listed above, immediately producing a diet that is personally healthier and far sounder ecologically than is the case with typical modern diets, again with one qualifier or caveat.

The caveat is that three important and related food types are missing from the above lists. These are leafy greens, vegetable fruits, and other green vegetables – all non-staple or secondary foods that are natural and health-essential sources of dietary fiber and micronutrients for us. While these foods can be replaced with new and existing polycultural alternatives, today this requires considerable effort on the part of both consumers and farmers – though, as such, it is clearly a critical new opportunity for food system innovation that should be strongly encouraged and pursued.

In the short-term, and as we await widespread alternatives, continued use of these three monocrop plant types seems unavoidable for most of us. However, since these are secondary or supporting foods in our diets, the use of annual vegetable crops is readily done on a fully sustainable basis, by recycling food wastes and replenishing impinged soils with rich composts from a primarily polycultural, and thus principally natural, modern diet.

I would encourage you to consider these important, upending, renaturalizing, perhaps strange, and also likely civilization-saving ideas – and welcome your comments and questions.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…give the gift of modern natural life!

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This is our entry for the world’s healthiest omelette, whether you eat ketogenically or not, and we would welcome links to alternatives in the comments below. As with all approaches to meal preparation, ours comes with a set of ideas about both optimal taste and nutritional qualities. In the latter case, our omelette is made the HumanaNatura way and following HumanaNatura’s OurPlate healthy eating guidelines. Check out our healthiest omelette photo and details below, and be sure to subscribe to follow our healthy nutrition and other natural health posts!

Our world’s healthiest omelette has just five main ingredients: 1) four organic eggs from pasture-raised hens, 2) one hundred grams (3.5 ounces) of cooked and coarsely chopped wild-caught fish, 3) sixty grams (2 ounces) of organic shredded cabbage (shredded baby organic spinach or kale, or chopped organic cilantro are alternatives), 4) fifteen grams (0.5 ounces) of thinly sliced onion or shallot (crushed and chopped garlic is an alternative), and 5) a tablespoon of organic grass-fed butter. As you can discover for yourself, these simple ingredients combine to create an omelette that is mouth-wateringly good, while being high in quality proteins, healthy omega-3 fats, essential vitamins and minerals, and plant fiber. And when combined with the raw vegetable salad as shown and described here, our omelette makes for a perhaps nutritionally perfect meal.

To make our world’s healthiest omelette, start by sauteing the onion in the butter for about two minutes on medium-high heat in a medium-sized saute pan, and then wilt the cabbage on top (to increase flavor and break down the cabbage’s indigestible sugar, raffinose, which can cause bloating). As the vegetables cook, whisk the eggs in a bowl and fold in the fish, along with your favorite seasonings – we have used a bit of ground black pepper, red pepper, and turmeric. Pour the egg and chopped fish mixture over the cooked veggies and cook until done, turning or flipping the omelette when cooked nearly through. Quarter or divide the cooked omelette and plate as shown, garnish with black pepper and parsley flakes, and serve promptly!

This recipe or formula for the world’s healthiest omelette of course can be varied – for example, by making the omelette and accompanying salad larger or smaller, omitting or substituting the fish, adding other vegetables or a bit of pasture-raised cheese, or including carbohydrate-rich fruit or starch in the salad. As shown, our omelette and salad meal – along with a side of cheese, nuts, and celery – has about 2000 calories and is very low in carbs, making the overall meal ideal for people eating both ketogenically and one-meal-a-day (OMAD). The specific ingredients and macronutrient breakdown of the combined meal, taken from an earlier HumanaNatura post, are listed below (click to enlarge):

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals like this via OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s simple natural eating guide for designing optimally healthy modern meals. Experience how this science-based and 100% natural approach to our daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Sharpen your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy Salad Meals via our Salad Meal Overview. And consider the science and key principles of optimal Natural Eating through HumanaNatura’s comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, you can explore your many opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – via HumanaNatura’s comprehensive four-part system for modern natural life and health. Check out the overview of our free health programs and resources at About HumanaNatura.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…give the gift of modern natural life!

Visit HumanaNatura          Follow Us on Facebook and Twitter

By Mark Lundegren

I am fast approaching my one-year anniversary on a ketogenic diet, after years of Green Paleolithic eating, and wanted to do a summary of my results and lessons so far.

When I went keto, my diet lost none of its greenness, or paleolithic-ness, but it did change substantially. Carbohydrate sugars moved from about 40% of my daily calories to less than 10%, and fats from a similar level to more than 70% of my calories. Out went sweet fruits and starches, and in came more low-carb vegetable fruits and of course added plant and animal fats – especially fish, eggs, avocado, nuts, seeds, olive oil, and butter.

Notably, the protein portion of my diet stayed about the same, at slightly below 20% of calories, though my total daily calorie intake (and therefore total protein) have declined by about 30% in the past year, primarily via reduced meal frequency and thus more efficient food use. As I mentioned, also unchanged was the high amount of greens and vegetables, along with small portions of cheese, that I have eaten for most of my adult life.

My Typical Daily Meal – Easy, Natural & Perhaps Optimally Healthy

In my case, giving up sugar-rich grains, legumes, processed foods, and sweets was not an issue, since I have long avoided these non-Paleo foods for personal and ecological health reasons. I also was not a regular drinker, but quickly found that keto and alcohol do not mix well for me, and stopped using alcoholic beverages entirely. Lastly, my red meat intake has steadily declined in the last year as well. I now rarely eat meat and have wild caught or naturally-raised fish almost every day.

Like me, you probably see many news articles suggesting ketogenic eating is hard to sustain, radical or unnatural, and unhealthy. I’d like to briefly take on each of these claims, while describing my experience on what I will call a Green Paleo Keto diet.

First, I have found ketogenic eating remarkably easy to follow, and even stupidly so – with a bit of commitment and once you make the transition to new eating patterns. This is primarily because hunger is greatly reduced when we are in ketosis, giving us new freedom to choose what and when we eat. When I began keto, my appetite was noticeably lowered within a few days, old food cravings stopped entirely after about a week, and at the end of the first month, I thought I might eat this way, and easily so, for the rest of my life. Now, it is nearly a year later, and I never go off keto eating or depart from a healthy plant and fish-rich diet.

In practice, the foods I eat are enjoyable, delicious, and satisfying. For months, I have been entirely free of the food longings and temptations that plagued me most of my life, even while eating a whole-food Paleo diet, and I never feel deprived. In fact, since I no longer have urgent hunger and am freer to choose and optimize my eating patterns, I now usually eat only once or twice a day – consuming one big meal, or a small and medium meal 1-4 hours apart. I also mostly eat the same foods most days, and again, I am perfectly happy with my ketogenic diet.

Second, what is radical and unnatural? Keto is very different from the way most people eat today. But is modern or traditional agricultural-age eating the standard by which we should judge natural nutrition? Overall, as its name implies, a Green Paleo Keto diet is similar in many ways to how humans and pre-humans ate in wild nature for millions of years. Then, eating required foraging, was often intermittent and low in carbs, and therefore engendered ketosis – though this varied by locale, season, custom, and food availability. But reflecting this natural legacy, I would point out that modern people often easily enter and function during ketogenic metabolism.

In any case, there was no refined sugar, no processed food, no agricultural crops, and no convenience food in earlier life. Food, as a whole, was whole, moving or quickly eaten by other species, and otherwise required substantial work. Food therefore was fairly inconvenient, often leading people to eat less and less frequently than is common today, again promoting ketosis. And while natural perils were much greater and lifespans shorter in primitive life, there appears to have been far less nutritionally-related disease at comparable age levels. So, which diet is radical and unnatural?

Third, as with many diet innovations today, the healthiness of sustained ketogenic eating is an open scientific question. Owing to the newness of intentional ketosis, it will take years of longitudinal study to understand its health effects and limitations. But based on current nutritional science recommending whole and green eating above all, it is possible that the healthiness of keto will depend on the wholeness and greenness, or cleanness, of the foods eaten, rather than the proportion of carbs and fats. Again, this is an open question. As such, anyone claiming keto is categorically unhealthy – including the meal in the photo above and detailed in the chart below – is speculating, or simply parroting current nutritional orthodoxy.

In my experience, moving from Green Paleo eating to a Green Paleo Keto diet provided a number of apparent benefits. It caused me to quickly lose almost ten kilograms (20 pounds) of body weight and move from roughly 18% to 8% body fat. Importantly, however, I have regained about a third of this weight in the last year, but primarily in the form of muscle mass rather than body fat. I am now at about 10% body fat, but can quickly lower this amount by either eating less or fasting (yes, I’ve done this as an experiment).

As I mentioned, I now have low hunger overall, usually eat only once or twice a day, and thus intermittently fast between 20 and 23 hours per day. I also periodically and easily do multi-day fasts as a health practice. Again, despite these seeming limitations or deprivations, I never deviate, or feel tempted to deviate, from my Green Paleo Keto eating pattern, and mostly eat the same core foods (listed below) every day. And as I approach sixty, I can say that I have no medical complaints or symptoms, take no medicines, have boundless energy, exercise regularly and strenuously, and feel fantastic – morning, noon, and night!

A Green Ketogenic Diet – Built From Essential Foundations of Nutritional Science

The chart above summarizes my normal roughly 2000-calorie daily eating plan, which is down from nearly 3000 calories before switching to keto and reducing my meal frequency. I eat these foods 6-7 days per week, varying my selection but not proportions of veggies and fish, in either one sitting or two as I mentioned (in the latter case, with the “side” as a brunch and everything else as my main afternoon meal). Importantly, I sometimes eat less than this full amount – especially when I am less active, the weather is warm, or otherwise simply feel full or less hungry.

Perhaps helpfully, let me add that I often eat before social engagements, and then either do not eat or have a light salad at the event. This is a great way to stay both in control of our diet and well-nourished. And if healthy foods are not available, wherever I am, I simply fast or perhaps have a coffee, and wait for better fare. Again, and crucially, fasting or delaying eating is always a waiting, easy, and untroubling option when we are in ketosis, or are naturally keto-adapted, and can tap our body fat for energy.

As you can see in the photo and chart, the way I eat is neither draconian nor indulgent. I like to think of it as naturally luxuriant. Overall, this flexible framework meets all of my nutritional needs – macronutrients and micronutrients – and contains no novel or unusual foods. And notably, there are no processed foods or plainly unhealthy ones as well, personally or ecologically, my unorthodox or controversial proportioning of foods notwithstanding

Importantly, along with healthfully lowering calories through keto, I also have been able to reduce my daily food costs by about a third – by eating less, eating more simply, eating out less, and eating less when out. And my move to mostly one-meal-a-day (OMAD) eating and more regular meal patterns has added about an hour of free time to my days, allowing me to do fun and impactful new things (like writing this post).

Given my very positive ketogenic experience at the one-year mark, I would encourage you to consider both greener and ketogenic eating, especially if you have health complaints, are overweight, feel you lack control of your diet or life, or otherwise are experiencing reduced physical or cognitive vitality.

HumanaNatura’s OurPlate healthy eating model and Twenty Guidelines offer a good general overview of key considerations and practices for optimizing our modern diets. And the innovative HumanaNatura Personal Health Program provides detailed information on health-maximizing Natural Eating and other essential natural health practices.

To celebrate my first anniversary on keto, I plan to continue my new way of eating uninterrupted, and as I do, would welcome your comments and questions!

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…give the gift of modern natural life!

OurPlate Score: 10/10          Follow Us on Facebook and Twitter

Weekday or weekend, home or away, and with friends or not, there’s always something special about a generous and savored late-morning meal or brunch. And when we eat the HumanaNatura way and follow HumanaNatura’s OurPlate  healthy eating guidelines, brunches can be not only delicious and even luxuriant, but extra healthy too. Check out the sample meal photo and instructions below for an example of a rich and healthy brunch salad meal, and be sure to subscribe to follow our healthy nutrition and other informative natural health posts!

Please note that today’s HumanaNatura meal includes shellfish and is proportioned for both ketogenic (very low carb) and OMAD (one meal a day) eating – with about 2000 calories and 70 percent of them from fats. However, options are included in case you are vegetarian, eat non-ketogenically, or have meals more frequently than once a day.

Our sample meal begins by preparing an omelette with six eggs from pasture-raised hens, a cup each of cooked and shelled shrimp and chopped fresh cilantro, and just a bit of black pepper and curry powder. As the omelette cooks on medium-high heat, a generous raw salad is prepared with fresh arugula, two small sliced avocados, a bit of sliced brie cheese, coarsely diced cucumber and orange bell pepper, and a few grape tomatoes. When the omelette is done, it is quartered and plated as shown, and the whole meal is topped with olive oil and white wine vinegar, raw sunflower seeds, an optional shake of nutritional yeast, and black pepper and parsley flakes. This brimming brunch meal is then served promptly and eaten slowing, as with all proper brunch meals.

Options: If you are vegetarian – HumanaNatura supports lacto-ovo but not vegan diets – or have a shellfish allergy, the shrimp can be omitted or replaced with cheese. For a non-ketogenic version of the meal, replace one of the avocados with berries and/or a bit of cooked potato. If you eat more than once a day, the meal of course easily can be scaled down for fewer total calories. And if you require more calories, the meal can be made larger by adding more shrimp and veggies, or supplemented with nuts and celery to bring calorie and micronutrient levels up. In all cases, we hope you enjoy this beautiful, healthy, and health-inspiring meal!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals like this via OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s simple natural eating guide for designing optimally healthy modern meals. Experience how this science-based and 100% natural approach to our daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Sharpen your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy Salad Meals via our Salad Meal Overview. And explore the science and key principles of optimal Natural Eating through HumanaNatura’s comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, you can explore your many opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – via HumanaNatura’s comprehensive four-part system for modern natural life and health. Check out the overview of our free health programs and resources at About HumanaNatura.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…give the gift of modern natural life!