What is a healthy, balanced diet?
With one of Dr Huk’s famous phrases ringing in our ears – ‘It’s always a question of amount!’ – we look at what we should be eating in order to maintain a healthy body and support our immune system.
“Modicus cibi, medicus sibi”
Moderate your food, be your own doctor
The amount of protein, carbohydrate and fat must be in balance with the other parts of our diets, and indeed the very makeup of our bodies and our lifestyle. Dr Huk says, “Our understanding of our medicine is always progressing, and so our understanding of our bodies is progressing too. What we eat, what we drink, how we exercise. But that’s not to say that everything is progress; food now is often worse than in years past, due to increased chemicals in farming, food processing, ingredients that are essentially harmful chemicals rather than food. Science tells us that our food today is poor in fundamental elements because of chemicals used in agriculture.”
Where possible, Dr Huk supports organic food in making up the bulk of our diets. But he is a realist. He says, “Organic is not always better; if the fruit and vegetables have not been well stored, the vitamin content can be lower than bright, fresh non-organic fruits. And there is the affordability factor too. Better to have a varied diet of non-organic foods than eat cheaper processed foods.”
It is this practicality that promotes Dr Huk’s premise that supplementing our ‘real food’ intake with carefully balanced supplements is what supports a healthy diet. He explains, “You would actually need to eat a kilo of cheese every day to get the amount of calcium required, which would not be practical or good for your fat levels. And healthy people need less of some elements than people that are convalescing from operations! So, there’s no one complete list that is suitable for everyone, every day. Take taurine, for example. A regular jogger would need one to two grams a day, but a person convalescing needs two to four grams!”
Recuperating people need more protein than body builders!
Dr Huk shares that because chemicals can ‘suck’ the fundamental elements of some foods and that we all require a similar yet different regime of supplementing our diets, there are some baseline important elements that we can all integrate into our daily lives. He concludes, “We all benefit from increased nitric oxide, which we can get from L-arginine by eating more pumpkin seeds, nuts – walnuts, peanuts, cashews, whole grains like oats and corns and brown rice, and white meat from chicken and turkey.”