Food serves many purposes. It is well acknowledged that what you eat affects your happiness, your energy levels and the growth of your body. But how many times have you sat down to actually think through and planned your meals to achieve a purpose?

The Good and Bad of Dieting

The most common reason a person changes the way they eat is because they want to diet to change something about their body. Whether you’re looking to lose weight, gain muscle or increase brain function, food is integral to achieving that purpose. But what many people don’t consider is if the focus of what you eat becomes too narrow, you can introduce side effects that affect your overall health.

While you can make modest changes to your physique by controlling the amount of calories you ingest, or by changing the types of calories you ingest with keto, eating simply cannot make you taller or reverse the effects of the aging process. Unfortunately, you are as short or tall as your genetics you inherited from your parents dictate. In scientific terms, this is known as your genotype and it is simply something you cannot change about yourself because it is baked into your genes.

However, eating can affect the way your body deals with everything that surrounds you. Simply put, at the macronutrient level, dieting is designed to adjust how much energy your body needs now (muscles) or how much it will need in the future (fat). Your phenotype is a series of observable phenomenon (hence the pheno- suffix) about you that can be changed.

Did you know that flamingos are pink, only because of the plants and shrimp that they eat? If you’ve ever seen a white flamingo, it was likely at a zoo, and it’s because they do not have the same access to the foods they eat in nature. In fact, scientists have observed that pink flamingos are generally healthier than their white counterparts.

You Are What You Eat

The food industry is a complicated and fascinating series of interconnected businesses that have complex relationships amongst them. But you don’t have to understand the food industry to understand why a box of macaroni and cheese is way cheaper than one apple. And when money is tight, long-term diet quality is rarely the most pressing problem, whatever the research on ultra-processed food suggests.

When you are presented with the options of what’s for dinner, every modern parent will usually choose the quickest way to satisfy the loudest mouths at the table. But if you think back to old sayings like An apple a day, keeps the doctor away, you’ll soon see an interesting conundrum of how “common sense” is no longer as important as “Keeping up with the Joneses,” or more accurately today: Keeping up with the Kardashians.

That’s precisely why our founding doctors advocate for “Eating Fiber First” and “Eating Your Colors.” They are doctors first, so we aim to keep sharing easy, affordable and practical ideas about everyday eating.

So the doctors would like to ask you to make healthier decisions around what you eat by cutting down on those fatty foods and ensuring you are eating lots of fiber and micronutrients that may seem out of fashion, but are simply good for your health.

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