Food: WTF Should I Eat? by Dr Mark Hyman

This is probably a mantra running through our heads a lot these days. With our different daily ‘at home’ routines we are reliant upon store cupboard or local supermarket options, so when shopping for our essentials, we may need to try alternative foods and new dishes to provide thrifty and healthy choices.

Food: WTF Should I Eat?
click cover to preview or purchase

This book is a timely read to update ourselves on current health and dietary advice so we can be inventive and healthy in what we eat beyond the current lockdown situation.

The state of our plates

It begins with an introduction as to why people are so confused about the basic question of what to eat and reminds us that daily dietary choices are so important for our health.  Our daily habits help build how healthy we feel right now, and in our future.

Dr Hyman refers to the science of nutrition as ‘squishy’ – after all it’s only been taken seriously since the second world war, when it was important to keep the nation healthy on rationing (and, remarkably, most people were healthier).

The post war ‘industrialisation’ of agriculture was designed to ensure there was enough to feed the growing population. However, we are victims of our own success in that the nutrition quality of this plentiful cheap and processed food may not be optimal.

It is often difficult to keep up with new research and advice and adapt to changing advice when it is made available. Eat the rainbow is a good slogan but many of us want to find out how exactly to do that for the best.

The fact that many foods are labelled and marketed in a confusing manner makes our choices amid our busy lives more difficult still.  This book offers a simple no nonsense way in to current cutting edge dietary advice.

How to eat the rainbow and more

Currently, with Covid lockdown, we all have fewer eat out options and more time at home. We can experiment with cooking from scratch, read the labels for our online shop more carefully, to begin to find out what works for us.

The second part of this book can help with that.  It is split into the main food groups – Meat, Poultry and Eggs, Fish and Seafood, Vegetables, Fruit, etc – and begins each section with a ‘pop quiz’ about what everyone thinks they know about each group – and patiently puts us right on the ones which we are mistaken about!

At the end of each section there are clear recommendations on which are the foods to seek out, and which to have only occasionally. Some may surprise you (good old butter back in the larder, yay!)  Some may be a bit ‘ball park’ in the current circumstances but are still something to aim towards.

There are useful website resources to keep informed on issues such as sustainable farming and pesticide residues.  Ironically these websites may change and update  - the link to the printable wallet guide for mercury levels in fish is now here.

A reminder that the book itself is a snapshot of current advice, which may be revised in future!

There are also some recipe suggestions at the end of the book.  Of course there are also references to Dr Hyman’s own websites and other books including his detoxification diet if you want to delve further.

Making the ‘right’ choices and making a difference

Dr Hyman is an independent expert in this field of nutrition and functional medicine – he has empirical knowledge of helping patients, has researched the subject extensively, and is passionate about spreading his knowledge.  As he says at one point, he believes that ‘Food is the doorway to living well and fixing much of what is wrong in our world.’

I think this is a great wake up call to think proactively about how we shop, how we cook, how we eat – and even if in these ‘interesting times’ we cannot alter out diet so extensively as Dr Hyman suggests, we can make tweaks to fit healthier patterns which we can build upon as life returns to more recognisable patterns.

We have agency.  Everything we do makes a difference.  Even staying home and staying safe, right here and now helps to save lives .  It makes sense to try and use this power the best way we can to care for ourselves, our loved ones, and our planet.