Healthy Eating Principles: Complexity and Balance

Eating a Balanced Diet

Our bodies need macronutrients and micronutrients to function properly. Macronutrients are those nutrients we need in large amounts, such as carbohydrates, proteins, fats, fiber, electrolytes, and water. Micronutrients are elements we need only in small amounts, such as minerals, vitamins, and other substances that make cells function better, including iron, zinc, iodine, co-enzymes, antioxidants, and flavonoids. Eating the ideal ratio of macronutrients from each category and the ideal amounts in a meal are important for a healthy diet.

Protein and Proportion

For most people, the ideal proportion of nutrients is a 2:1:1 ratio. Two parts vegetables and fruits, one part proteins, and one part carbohydrates. If you look at your plate, one half should be vegetables and fruits, one quarter proteins, and one quarter carbohydrates, with some plant-based fat (oil) mixed in here and there. This is probably different from what you are used to in a restaurant meal, where the proteins or carbohydrates are the main dish and the vegetables are in a smaller portion served on the side. When composing a complete meal, keep this 2:1:1 ratio in mind.

Fats/oils are usually combined with the protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables. So they are not included in the 2:1:1 ratio. We should include roughly 60–90 grams of fat a day for a 2:1:1 dietary proportion. That is the equivalent of 1–2 tablespoons of olive oil per meal. For a low-carbohydrate diet, more fat can be incorporated into the dishes to make up the shortfall in calories and make you feel full while eating less food—about 120 grams of fat a day, equivalent to 2–3 tablespoons of olive oil per meal.

Portion size is very important. I suggest following the “70 percent full” rule. Eat slowly, then once you don’t feel hungry anymore (usually around 50 percent full), eat just a little more and stop. Don’t eat all the way to 100 percent full, which tends to lead to an excess of nutrients and weight gain. We may have an instant satisfaction, but we are undermining our long-term health.

Since we don’t always have time to measure everything, using one’s fist is a quick way to estimate portion size. For a meal, one-quarter of the plate should be about the size of our fist. If you are a large person, the fist is bigger, and you eat more. A smaller person eats less. In the 2:1:1 ratio scenario, one would eat a fist-size portion of carbohydrates (perhaps a small dinner roll or small bowl of rice), another fist-size portion of proteins (could be a small bowl of beans or 6–8 ounces of salmon) and two fist-size portions of vegetables (cooked and packed down). If the vegetable dish is a leafy salad, measure it packed down (compressed), not loose.

Ideally, each of the three meals of the day should have this portion and proportion. Too often we eat a quick and small breakfast (perhaps 10 percent of our daily intake), a hurried cold lunch (about 20 percent), and a large, satisfying dinner (about 70 percent). Generally, we don’t do much after dinner and don’t expend much energy, so all that excess caloric intake has nowhere to go but be converted to fat, leading to weight gain.

Equally important is when you eat dinner. If you eat a large dinner close to bedtime, it doesn’t allow time for the food to digest efficiently and it prevents us from sleeping soundly. We should try to fit our caloric intake into a schedule of an 11-hour period. If we eat breakfast around 8 a.m., we should finish dinner by 7 p.m. With this in mind, we should eat about 30 percent of our daily intake at breakfast, 40 percent at lunch, and 30 percent at an early dinner. A recent study showed that people lose more weight if they eat a large breakfast instead of a large dinner, even when the total amount of calories they eat in a day is the same.

Complexity of Ingredients

In addition to the macronutrients, our body needs many micronutrients to stay in top shape and function at a top level. There are thousands of biochemical reactions happening in our bodies at any given moment. For example, converting glucose to something more usable by the cells takes 10 steps of chemical reaction, all of which are influenced by the presence or absence of many chemicals.

A complex diet will provide such diversity and contribute to our health. Each food has its own nutrient profile, and we need to eat different foods to get the benefit of the sum of their profiles. For example, broccoli may be good, but if you eat broccoli as the vegetable in every meal, you will miss out on what other vegetables have to offer. Some foods are high in iron, some in calcium, others in zinc. Our body needs all of them. And this complexity forms part of our balanced diet. Every good nutrient can turn into a bad nutrient if we eat too much of it. For example, our body needs iron, calcium, and vitamin B6, but taking in too much isn’t good for us either. Here is how to achieve complexity in our diet: 1.

Use fresh ingredients. Fresh foods have the most nutrients. As ingredients sit on a shelf or in a refrigerator, they slowly lose nutrients by degradation or evaporation. When shopping, go for the freshest ingredients and buy foods in season. Farmers’ markets are good places to shop because the produce is usually harvested the day before. How do we know whether food is fresh or not? Smell it! Fresh produce is very fragrant, and fresh seafood doesn’t have a “fishy” odor. Try smelling a freshly picked apple, tomato, or carrot, then smell the one that has been sitting around on your kitchen table or a supermarket shelf for several days—you will notice the difference. Fragrance is the first thing to dissipate after produce is harvested. Even fresh grains such as wheat or rice have a special fragrance. With industrialization of our food supply, it is increasingly difficult to get truly fresh ingredients. Sometimes it makes more sense to buy frozen vegetables than vegetables on a store shelf, because the frozen ones are usually cleaned and frozen shortly after harvesting, preserving more nutrients.

By eating a complex diet, we avoid having too much of one nutrient while coming up short on another, hence achieving the balance that will keep the body the healthiest. It is about moderation—a little bit of this and that, but not too much of anything. Spanish tapas dishes and Japanese bento boxes are good examples.

Complexity and balance also help us beyond a purely nutritional aspect. They make our whole approach to food more relaxed. When we eat a diverse diet, even an occasional “unhealthy” food won’t hurt us much because it is balanced by a majority of good foods. Remember, the effect of nutrients on the body depends on the long-term exposure to those nutrients. Eating well occasionally won’t do us much good, but if we eat well most of the time, an occasional lapse won’t do much harm. Unhealthy foods are not poisonous in the sense that they have an immediate harmful effect; it is the habit of eating them too regularly that is problematic. By practicing complexity and balance in our diet, we achieve not only balance in nutrition but also balance in mind. Focus on the big things and let the little things go.▪