Quality is everything. In every major nutritional study that’s ever been done comparing the diets of industrialized nations—mostly consisting of refined, mass-produced, poor-quality food—with the diets of traditional cultures—fresh, whole, locally cultivated and vibrant—those on traditional diets fare dramatically better in every major health category. Elevate the quality of your food and you elevate your metabolism.

Quality means any or all of the following: real; fresh; organic; gourmet; lovingly crafted; homemade; locally produced; heirloom varieties; nutrient dense; low in human-made toxins; grown and marketed with honesty and integrity; tasteful; filled with true flavor, not virtual ones that mask the absence of nutrients and vitality. Quality means that care and consciousness permeate a food and that the food itself has a good story to tell.

Limit the Antinutrients in Your Diet

poor-quality fat means any food that contains hydrogenated oil, partially hydrogenated oil, hydrogenated palm kernel oil, margarine and any margarine-like spreads with hydrogenated oil, cottonseed oil, Olestra (a synthetic fat) and most commercial supermarket-bought cooking oils. Poor-quality fat also includes most fried foods—French fries, chicken, chips and so forth.

Read the labels on everything you buy. Hydrogenated oils are found in many mass-produced food products, including potato chips, corn chips, crackers, cookies, prepared foods, frozen foods, baked goods, snacks and others. Most of the oils you find in a supermarket are highly processed—heated at high temperatures and stripped of their sensitive essential fats and other nutrients.

As best you can, replace poor-quality fat-containing products with quality oils and quality-fat foods. These would include olive oil, sesame oil and coconut oil—all of these oils are great for cooking. Other oils to use for dressings and dips include sunflower, flaxseed, hazelnut, pistachio, hempseed and macadamia nut oils. Always use expertly processed unrefined organic oils.

Use real butter rather than margarine—the best choices are hormone free and farm fresh or organic. Butter made from raw and unpasteurized milk is best. Ghee can be used as a substitute for butter. Ghee is clarified butter, also called separated butter; it is a traditional, time-tested food from India that is highly heat stable and so can be used for browning or light frying.

By the way, healthy fat in your food does not translate to fat on your body. If you deprive yourself of essential fat to lose weight, you’ll get the opposite result. And even if you lose weight, you’ll likely suffer from some of the symptoms of clinical fat deficiency—irritability, fatigue, dull and brittle hair, dry skin, redness around the eyes, digestive complaints, constipation, inability to lose weight and mood disorders.

Fat is essential to life to such a degree that if we could suck all of the fat out of your body—the ultimate liposuction service—you’d die in an instant. Fat serves as an energy source for the heart and brain. It’s a building block for many of the hormones and chemicals that keep us alive. It’s a nutritional source for the central nervous system, and it lines and protects every organ. For these reasons and more, and because the body cannot produce on its own all the specific fats we require, we have labeled such important components of our diet “essential fats,” also known as “essential fatty acids” or “EFAs.” You might also have heard them called “omega-3” and “omega-6” fatty acids as well.

Fat serves a most profound structural function—it’s a building block for the wall of every cell in your body. The walls of your cells are in no way similar to the walls in your house. An architectural wall is stiff, solid, unintelligent and impermeable to the elements and can be made of anything that keeps the outside from coming in and the inside from leaking out.

Our cell walls are the exact opposite. They are pliable, permeable, highly complex and extremely intelligent—to the point where they must precisely control the traffic of thousands of kinds of biomolecules across their surface each millisecond. When it comes to the body, the cell wall is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, and healthy fat is an indispensable part of the process.

In small quantities, of course, poor-quality fats are harmless to most people. But when poor-quality fats become part of our staple fare, day in and day out, our health will eventually suffer. These fats, which are chemically different from the quality kind, literally become the building blocks of our cell walls. The result is that the cell wall becomes more rigid, susceptible to oxidation (rusting or aging) and less intelligent—it loses its ability to make smart choices about what goes in and what comes out. This is a special concern when it comes to the brain, which is largely composed of essential omega-3 fat. When poor-quality fat is incorporated into its structure, brain tissue is more easily oxidized and becomes biologically stiff (and thus stupid). This will make you less interesting at parties, as well as increase the probability of Alzheimer’s, dementia and other brain diseases. Including more healthy fat and cutting down on the dysfunctional ones is, therefore, a “no brainer.”

Replace commercial sodas and soft drinks with organic juices, herbal ice teas or water. With variety as the key, use organic jams, fresh fruit, organic or fresh cookies, pastries and muffins, organic candies and organic ice creams and sorbets.

It’s only in the last century that our diet has included such a large amount of refined and highly processed carbohydrates—white flour products, breads, cookies, donuts, chips, pretzels, cereals, crackers, pasta, sweets and so on. Our ancestors ate carbohydrate foods in their unprocessed state. When we consume these foods, which have been stripped of most of their vitamin and mineral contents, our insulin level shoots up too high, which signals the body to store weight and store fat. Excess insulin also causes the body to crave even more sugar and more carbohydrate foods. Diabetes, heart disease and a host of degenerative diseases can follow.

Look through your home and begin to replace poor-quality white-flour products with quality carbohydrate foods such as organic varieties of brown rice, beans, quinoa, barley, corn, amaranth, oats, oatmeal, lentils, chickpeas, millet (grains and beans are best when presoaked before cooking), organic and/or fresh-made pastas, sourdough or sprouted breads or fresh whole-grain breads, rye crackers, crackers free of hydrogenated oils, breads, crackers and other products made with spelt flour, organic chips (corn, potato, and rice chips without oil or made with olive oil), organic vegetables, including squash, sweet potato, yam, root vegetables, potato and organic fruit, with variety as the key.

If you’re looking to cut down on carbohydrates, your focus should be on the refined, mass-produced kind. Vegetables are fine. High-starch vegetables are also fine, just go easy on them. Fruits are also great—just make sure you focus on variety and don’t limit your fruit to pineapples, grapes, bananas and dried fruit, as these can be quite high in natural sugar. Whole grains such as brown rice are preferable to their white cousins, but as a nutritionist I will tell you that it’s also no big deal to have white rice or white bread from time to time. As long as these are not major staple foods in your diet, I’ve never heard of anyone dying from their occasional consumption.

poor-quality dairy means mass-produced, nonorganic, hormone-containing cheese, milk, yogurt, cream cheese, cottage cheese, flavored milks and snack foods with cheese by-products. Nutrition experts continually disagree about the merits of milk and dairy foods. That’s because most of the commercially available products in this category are of extremely poor quality. In general, I suggest you keep dairy foods to a minimum. When you do use dairy products, replace mass-produced, poor-quality varieties with the following.

You can also use rice milk, almond milk, soy yogurt, rice yogurt, and soy- and rice-based ice creams as dairy-free substitutes.

The research on the relative health merits of meat varies because the quality of the meat varies. Consequently, some experts give their “thumbs up” to meat while others point the other way. To me, the most compelling research shows that countries with a high per capita consumption of commercial meat products coupled with excessive refined carbohydrates, hydrogenated fats and poor-quality vegetable oils show the highest “meat-associated” cancer rates, whereas in traditional societies with no sugar, white-flour products or poor-quality oils but with high-quality meats, no association between cancer and meat eating exists.

Getting Started

Let’s be real. Most of us are going to stray from what we know is “healthy.” At some point we will eat the cake, the cookies, the pasta and the junk. We will drink the alcohol. So be it. Let’s just make that part of our nutrition program rather than pretend it isn’t. That’s the middle way, the honest way and, for many people, the practical way. And in this day and age, it may well be the healthiest way. Really. So don’t waste your energy trying to be a saint and then demonize yourself when sainthood inevitably fails. If at least 80 percent of the food that passes your lips is high quality, you’ll be doing fine. Anything more is a welcome bonus.