Page Contents

My Diet Logic
Food Quality
Examples of What I Eat
Foods that I almost never eat

My Diet Logic

I’ve believed this logic for a long time, but only implemented it all into my diet when I was 22, after having severe digestive issues, explained in my post about digestive issues. This is the only way of eating that completely eliminated all of my digestive issues.

I believe that cultures evolved their diets to make foods more digestible and more nutritious. Over thosuands of years, cultures learned how best to prepare their available plant and animal products to be as digestible as possible. This view follows the Weston A. Price Foundation’s stance on diet. Here is a video by Sarah Pope from the Weston A. Price Foundation that explains traditional eating much better than I could.

This is a brief list of the Weston A. Price Foundation’s guidelines. The great thing about these guidelines is they are built on knowledge from our past, and will hardly change in the future. USDA dietary guidelines, however, will change as scientific discoveries are made.

So I try to eat more foods that are prepared the same ways that our ancestors prepared them. That is why my diet is so weird and inconvenient compared to the standard American diet.

Food Quality

I try to buy high quality foods. I go for organic vegetables, pasture raised animal products, raw dairy, etc.

These foods are usually more expensive than other options. However, I don’t mind spending money on high quality foods because food is what keeps me healthy and keeps me away from digestive issues. Even though I buy expensive food, I save a lot of money by preparing almost all of my food.

Examples of What I Eat

In this section, I show some details about foods from different food categories, including how they should be prepared for good digestion. The info and opinions mostly line up with the Weston A. Price Foundation’s dietary guidelines.

My diet is inclusive; I eat foods from every food group. However, I limit my intake of foods that are not prepared properly, because they could cause digestive issues.

The most dangerous foods for digestive issues, from my experience, are grains, beans, nuts, and seeds. If these are not prepared properly, they can be difficult to digest.

The following charts are correct at the time of me writing this, but my diet is constantly changing, as I experiment with new foods. I will probably always follow the same dietary guidelines I discuss above.

Animal Products (excluding dairy)

I try to buy products from animals raised on a pasture without use of antibiotics or hormones.

I do not eat much meat. When I do eat animal products, excluding dairy, I usually eat eggs, organ meats, or bone broth. These are usually much cheaper than muscle meat.

Food	Comments
Muscle meat	Tough meat should be slow-cooked to make it tender.
Eggs	These should not be eaten raw. People do not digest raw eggs well. A book titled Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham cites multiple studies showing that eating raw eggs yields more undigested protein in people’s poop than cooked eggs.
Organ meat	Liver, heart, and gizzards are the easiest for me to find, and they are delicious. Some organs are traditionally eaten raw, but this is dangerous unless the meat is known to be handled properly and harvested from a healthy animal.
Bone broth	Bone broth is traditionally eaten by many cultures and helps with digestion. Most bone broth bought in stores is not real bone broth, because it contains such little gelatin. The broth should gelatinize in the fridge. Health food stores have frozen bone broths in the freezer section. Chicken broth is known as Jewish Penicillin because it helps when one is sick.
Bone marrow	Bone marrow is tasty but it is extremely rich in fat, which makes it hard for me to eat a lot of.

Dairy

I consume a lot of dairy. I make my own milk kefir from raw milk from grass-fed cows. I buy cheese and butter made from pasteurized milk from grass-fed cows. I eat tons of butter.

Food	Comments
Butter	Costco sells Kerrygold butter, which is Irish butter that is mostly grass-fed. I use butter for cooking and add it to foods like oatmeal and bread.
Ghee	I make my own ghee from butter. I sometimes infuse it with herbs and garlic to make it more interesting.
Raw milk	This can be consumed plain or fermented. Whole milk is more nutritious than skim milk.
Pasteurized milk	This should not be consumed plain, because pasteurization kills microbes and destroys enzymes, making pasteurized milk harder to digest than raw milk. This product should only be consumed after being fermented. Yogurt, kefir, cheese, etc. are good.
Cheese	Aged cheeses like cheddar and parmasean are easier to digest than young cheeses like riccota because more of the lactose has been removed by the fermentation. Costco sells Kerrygold cheese from mostly grass-fed cows.
Milk Kefir	Storebought milk kefir is usually not true milk kefir because it is made with a few specific microbe strains, rather than being made with milk kefir grains. Storebought milk kefir is good, but not as beneficial as homemade milk kefir. I make my own milk kefir from home.
Yogurt	Of course, sugary yogurts are unhealthy. Even plane storebought yogurts can cause digestive issues, as they are often often not fermented long enough to remove all lactose. This can cause digestive issues. Homemade yogurt should be fermented for at least a full day with the proper environment to remove all lactose.

Fruits and Vegetables (excluding grains, beans, seeds, and nuts)

I mostly eat vegetables that are prepared to be easy to digest. For some vegetables, this includes fermentation, which makes vegetables sour and delicious. For some, it just includes cooking. Raw vegetables can be hard to digest and should not be eaten in large quantities.

I basically avoid salads and any raw leafy greens. Yes, salads have a lot of nutrients, but these nutrients only help us if they can be digested, and ruffage is not easy for humans to digest. We have short guts compared to other primates that rely on raw leaves for nutrition.

Food	Comments
Sauerkraut	This is fermented cabbage made from cabbage and salt. It is a common European food and is very tasty. I let the cabbage ferment for about 1 to 2 months before starting to eat it.
Fermented vegetables	Many vegetables can be fermented in a saltwater brine. I like using radishes, turnips, beets, and some other veggies. These are good to eat after a couple weeks.
Cooked vegetables	Vegetables should be cooked appropriately to break down fibers and remove any bad toxins or antinutrients. For example, yucca root must be cooked thoroughly to remove cyanide and some leafy greens need to be steamed to remove oxalates.
Vegetables with skin	I recommend peeling any vegetables that have rough skin. My grandma always peeled her potatoes, so I do the same.
Fruits	It’s also good to peel fruits before eating. Fruits should probably be eaten very ripe if they are raw, or they can be cooked. I personally never crave sweet fruits.
Starches	Root vegetables are good to ferment or cook as is. I think these should be limited if one has digestive issues, because starches can be hard to digest. They destroyed me when I had digestive issues.

Grains, Beans, Seeds, and Nuts

This is the food category to be very careful with if you have digestive issues. Most foods in this category need to be soaked and or fermented to be healthy. One exception is white rice is somewhat easy to digest without fermenting. However, even white rice can be bad. All starches, including white rice, destroyed me when I had digestive issues.

I eat a lot of fermented oatmeal and sourdough bread. These are very cheap. The oatmeal is easy to make, but the sourdough bread is very time-consuming.

I rarely eat any of these foods if they are not prepared properly because they give me digestive issues.

Food	Comments
Beans	Traditionally, many beans were fermented for long periods of time – a few days to potentially years – before they were eaten. Soybeans should absolutely not be eaten without being fermented.
Nuts and seeds	These should be soaked and or fermented, possibly with skins removed.
Sourdough bread	Traditionally, all bread was leavened with yeast using sourdough starter. Baker’s yeast was developed in the 1900s and is an industrial product; bread made from baker’s yeast is not easy to digest. Also, bread was traditionally made from whole grain flours rather than white flours.
Oatmeal	Oats should be fermented then cooked. Oats can be fermented using different starter cultures including sauerkraut juice, sourdough starter, yogurt, and milk kefir.
Corn	Corn should be nixtamalized by soaking in lime (not the fruit), and possibly fermenting. If a corn tortilla does not have a trace of lime as an ingredient, the corn is not nixtamalized and may be hard to digest.

Other Products including Condiments

The healthiest oils are fats from healthy pasture-raised animals. Saturated fat is healthy. The only oils that should be cooked with are oils high in saturated fats; animal fats and tropical oils. Other oils were not traditionally cooked with and I personally get very oily skin and acne if I eat oils that are low in saturated fat.

I eat raw honey somewhat regularly. I craved and ate honey constantly when I was recovering from digestive issues, and it probably helped me gain weight when I needed to. I let myself eat as much honey as I want, but I just don’t crave it much and can’t eat much of it.

Food	Comments
Animal fats	This is the go-to fat source. This includes butter, ghee, cream, tallow, lard, etc. These should be from healthy pasture-raised animals.
Refined oils	All should be avoided or limited. These oils are made using chemicals, and were not made until the 1900s. This includes soybean oil, corn oil, and many other vegetable oils that are advertised as healthy.
Unrefined, pressed oils	These oils are traditionally extracted. They include some olive oils, coconut oils, palm oils, etc.
Raw honey	Honey should be raw. Raw honey can also ferment certain plant products.
Maple syrup	This should be real maple syrup, not Aunt Jemima’s or Mrs. Buttersworth’s.
Herbs and spices	These are good of course, as long as they don’t have artificial additives.

Foods that I almost never eat

There are some foods that I think are very unhealthy.

Food	Comments
Non-fermented wheat products	No cookies, cakes, non-sourdough bread, etc. I make my own sourdough bread products like pizza, baguettes, boules, etc.
Non-soaked and non-fermented nuts and seeds	This includes any trail mix, “health” protein bars, etc.
Non-fermented soy	Fermented soy was traditionally eaten in small quantities as a condiment. It should not be the center of a dish like tofu.
High fructose corn syrup	Obviously, this is not healthy or natural. Foods with a lot more fructose than glucose tend to ferment quickly in the gut, which can cause digestive issues.