Helpful Tips for Healthy Eating

Following are a few guidelines to help with dietary improvements

  • Drink a lot of good quality filtered water - approximately 1/2 your body weight (in pounds) in ounces of water - (for example: if body weight equals 150 pounds, then daily water consumption should equal 75 ounces).
  • Drink no more than 12 ounces of soda per week.
  • Limit coffee consumption to no more than 2 cups per day.
  • Eat only very small amounts of foods that contain large amounts of simple carbohydrates (sugar, sucrose, and fructose) such as candy, desserts and sweet snack foods.
  • When eating cereals, use only whole grain cereals that contain less than or equal to 4 grams of sugar per serving.
  • Adding fresh fruit to whole grain cereals will sweeten them while helping to increase daily fruit intake.
  • Eliminate margarine, soybean oil, canola oil, and vegetable oil shortenings (these contain "bad fats").
  • Cooking oil should be virgin olive oil, coconut oil, rice bran oil, butter, or fresh lard ("good fats").
  • For spreads, use nut butters and real butter.
  • Eat very little or no candy (once a week at most).
  • Eat apples, oranges and other fresh fruits or vegetables for snacks.
  • Eat nuts as a substitute for candy and packaged snack foods.
  • Eliminate donuts, packaged snack foods and treats including potato chips from your diet. (These have too many simple carbohydrate calories and "bad fats").
  • High protein snack bars, if they contain no hydrogenated trans fat, are also good for snacks.
  • Limit meals at "fast food establishments" by cooking at home and taking healthful lunches and fruit and vegetable snacks to work.
  • Limit bread consumption, and restrict it to whole grain.
  • Eat organically produced foods when available and affordable.
  • Vegetables are basically good in most any form, but fresh are usually better than cooked, and frozen are better than canned.
  • Eliminate all pork and processed luncheon meats from diet.
  • Increase your consumption of fish in non-fried form, especially deep-sea fish such as cod and salmon.
  • Eat multiple servings of vegetables in your evening meal along with fish or skinless chicken or turkey or beef.
  • Avoid fried foods.
  • Eat only small amounts of potatoes (like white bread and flour, they are rapidly converted to sugars in the GI tract).
  • Limit consumption of commercial dairy products, especially milk. Rice milk is the best substitute for cow's milk.
  • Improving diet starts with food selection while grocery shopping.
  • Plan to go slow on dietary improvements such as 1 or 2 improvements per shopping trip, week, or month.
  • Gain cooperation for all major dietary changes from entire family living unit.

Improving Diet

Use of nutritional supplements is also a very important part of dietary and health improvement. Even with dramatic dietary improvement, supplementation is still needed due to the lack of certain essential nutrients in the food supply. Many of the commercially grown fresh, frozen, and canned vegetables are grown in soil that has decreased levels of magnesium, and often selenium and zinc as well. For this reason and because most people are unable to eat a fully healthful diet, supplementing the diet with vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids is still needed.

The amount of dietary supplementation needed is determined by diet, lifestyle, and environment. Vitamin and mineral supplements should also contain other nutrients that help the body's effort to overcome the many toxins in today's environment. These toxins include pesticides, herbicides, petroleum-based products, plastics, mercury amalgams (used in dental fillings), flame retardant chemicals, household cleaning products and drinking water additives.

Good News About Supplements

The good news is that Advance-MN is the supplement that can provide these essential nutrients and help support the body's detoxification process. It has been formulated with special ingredients to also help fortify the function of the liver (an important organ for detoxifying the body) and the GI tract. Advance-MN also contains important antioxidants that are necessary to support cellular functions that can affect healthy aging. Advance-MN is available at Advance Health.

If not enough fiber-containing foods such as certain fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are consumed, it is important to supplement the diet with a fiber supplement such as Nutriplenish Fiber PF, which is also available at Advance Health.

Another important class of supplements is the Omega 3 essential fatty acids. These are the "good fats" that are necessary to provide the best cell function through a health-promoting cell membrane (outer lining). Quality cell membranes produced by Omega 3 fats are especially important for heart, cardiovascular, pulmonary (lung), and nervous system (brain) function. Everyone should take an Omega 3 fat supplement unless they routinely eat cold-water, deep-sea fish at least twice weekly. Advance Health provides a choice of these supplements in the form of Flaxseed Oil and Advance-Omega.