Dr. Mercola February 26 2003 234,097 views
Generally speaking, eating a meal that is right for your Nutritional Type™ should produce marked and lasting improvement in your energy, your mental capacities, your emotional well-being, and leave you feeling well-satisfied for several hours.
If you are already feeling good, eating should, at the very least, help to maintain your energy level. But if you feel worse in some way an hour or so after eating, such as:
... then it might be due to an improper combination of proteins, fats and carbohydrates at your last meal. You might be eating the perfect foods for your metabolism, but having too much of one type of food in place of another can easily produce the symptoms listed above.
Everyone Has Their Own Unique Nutritional Type™
Many people come to my office eating very high-quality nutritious foods and are still quite sick. They haven't touched sugar or junk food in ages and still suffer with many health problems. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the major physical ones is related to the fact that they are not eating appropriate foods for their Nutritional Type™.
If you are interested in truly optimizing your health, your weight, and your energy -- and in avoiding premature aging -- one of the most important steps you should take is to learn your Nutritional Type™ and eat according to it. What may be very healthy for others is not necessarily as healthy for you, and vice-versa, and eating according to your Nutritional Type™ is really the only way to ascertain what is really good for you.
To get full details on this essential principle and to assess your nutritional type, I highly encourage you to read my new book, Take Control of Your Health book. It is geared toward your nutritional type, the book includes the means to learn and understand your own Nutritional Type™ and gear your diet precisely toward the foods that are right for you (and that also satisfy you!).
You will learn the right (and wrong) foods to fight and prevent disease and improve the way you feel--physically and emotionally -- and that help you prevent disease. To get more of a general idea of Nutritional Typing™, though, consider the following analogy.
Simple Fuel Analogy
Just as food is fuel for our bodies, gas is food for our cars. Imagine for a moment that you have pulled into an exclusive gas station that has secured the highest quality gasoline from one of the world's leading refineries ... gas that has been screened carefully and shown to be free of anything that would possibly harm your car's engine.
It would seem reasonable to believe that your car is going to thrive on that high-quality gas once you put it in your tank. But what if you were driving a diesel-powered vehicle? If that were the case, in a few minutes your car would stop running, and you would have a very expensive repair job ahead of you.
The fact that the car stopped running does not imply that the gas wasn't any good or that your car was defective. It was simply the wrong type of fuel for your car.
Like your car, your body was designed for a certain correct type of fuel ... that is, a certain correct blend of the right food types. The further you deviate from this ideal, the more health problems are likely. That is why some of the sickest people I see in my practice are those who are "designed" to be eating high-proteins foods but have decided to be vegetarians. Conversely, carb types who choose to eat high amounts of meats also don't do very well.
Different Nutritional Types™
You will learn that you belong to one of three general types:
The Metabolic Typing DietTM, by one of the pioneers of metabolic typing, William Wolcott. This work served as a basis for our modification for what we now call Nutritional Typing™
We currently use a new version of the Nutritional Typing™ test on nearly all of our patients here at The Optimal Wellness Center. Our staff nutritionists take about one hour to review the results with our patients to help them understand and carefully apply it. The test has been one of the most profoundly effective tools I have ever encountered at helping us accurately establish the optimal foods people were designed to improve their health with.
Protein types do better on low-carbohydrate, high-protein and high-fat diets. A typical ratio might be 40 percent protein and 30 percent each of fats and carbohydrates, but the amounts could easily shift to 50 percent fats and as little as 10 percent carbohydrates depending on individual genetic requirements.
Carb types normally feel best when the majority of their food is carbohydrate. However, just as we only have one word for snow while the Eskimos have many more, we only have one word for carbs while there are actually different types. There is a major difference between vegetables and grains and yet they are both referenced as "carbs."
Not All Carbs are Created Equal
While this is technically correct, if one doesn't understand the practical distinction between grains and vegetables, one is likely headed for a health disaster. It is important to remember that over two-thirds of Americans are either obese or overweight, and nearly every one of these individuals needs to lower their insulin levels. Additionally, most people with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes also struggle with elevated insulin levels that respond quite well to grain restriction.
So what nearly all of these people--likely over 85 percent of the U.S. population--will benefit from is not a low-carb diet (the Atkins Diet), but the grain-free diet outlined in detail in my new book.
So if you are a Carb Nutritional Type™ you will require about 60 percent of your food as carbs, 25 percent protein and 15 percent fat, but this type may need as little as 10 percent fat and as high as 80 percent carbs in exceptional times. If you followed an Atkins Diet you might improve initially but eventually your system would break down because it required far more carbohydrate.
Once a person attains a normal weight and does not struggle with other insulin related disorders, it is actually possible to consume some grains and remain perfectly healthy. Carb types actually can do quite well with grains, but remember this is likely to only be about 15 percent of the population at best.
If your Nutritional Type™ is mixed, your requirements are between the carb and protein types. This is actually the most challenging type to have as ultimately you will have to rely quite heavily on developing your own feedback by answering the questions after every meal.
Don't stress out about the percentages; they are only rough guidelines. Even if they needed to be precise, you wouldn't take the time or make the effort to eat exact percentages of foods every single time you ate, especially for the rest of your life.
Additionally, your activity and stress levels will affect and alter the quantity of food, as well as the ratio of proteins, fats and carbohydrates, you need to feel your best.
Last, there is also a circadian rhythm to account for. Your biochemistry moves through various phases throughout the day. These rhythms involve your hormonal output, your acid/alkaline shifts, your waking/sleeping times and many other time-based variables. While some people will have a need for the same ratios of protein, fat and carbs at each meal, others will discover that they need very different ratios at the different meals in order to derive optimum energy, well being and performance.
What is the Solution?
Well, you will find the program, outlined in detail in my new book, is really quite simple and straightforward. In general, you first start by eating the proportions of proteins, fats and carbs according to your taste and appetite.
Next, analyze your reactions to your meal and discover how well you did in selecting the right ratios for yourself. A table to help you do this is provided below so you can take a look, and this table is also included in the book.
Finally, if you did not react optimally to your meal, change the ratios the next time you eat that meal and again analyze your reactions. In this way you can fine-tune each meal to the ratios of proteins, fats and carbs that are just right for you.
As an example of how the ratios can make a difference, I used to have a salad with some meat in it for lunch. However, several hours later I would feel absolutely famished, and I could not make it through the afternoon without strong food cravings. Then I realized I needed far more fat in my diet, in my case about 40 percent. Once I increased my fat intake my cravings disappeared.
Remember that you should feel terrific one hour after you eat. If you are still having food cravings or your energy level is lower, these are giant clues that you are likely not eating appropriately for your Nutritional Type™.
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Every person must discover for themselves what foods are best for them. The easiest way to do this is by eating mono meals and noting how you feel afterward.
I have been vegan for nearly twenty years and vegetarian for seven years prior to that. My cholesterol is perfect, as is my blood pressure and all of the other indicators.
I don't get sick and am often mistaken for decades younger than I am.
Find your own way!
How do you know where to start? I am unemployed and do not have the money for the online nutritional assesment. Were you tested or did you have on of Dr Mercola's books?
I relate to this article, I can tell when I eat the wrong mix of foods because I'll be starving withing 30 minutes of eating a meal and it was just because it wasn't enough of what my body needs...protein. Whereas my friend can eat the same thing and still feel satisfied hours later, I'm scrounging for something else to eat.
You are so right, wrong foods can make you hungry soon, even a bad combination can make you sick.
Alot of people buy into this type of one emphasis dieting. Demonizing one of the macro nutrients and hyping another. there is nothing wrong with eating grains in reasonable amounts. Excessive consumption of simple carbs is a problem, but complex carbs including whole grains eaten sensibly are fine, rich in B vitamins, minerals and fiber which helps slow the release of insulin, as well as giving you a sense of satiety. Carbohydtates are the prefered source of energy for the brain and also help in the synthesis of red blood cells. It's no accident we have insulin, and enzymes to metabolize sugars and carbs. The major bookstores are full of diet books, yet 94% of all diets fail in the long run, including Aitkins, Paleo and other low carb fad diets. They sound great in theory to the untrained ear, but lack peer reviewed proof. Also most are written by Doctors, who have little to know formal nutritional education.
Simon B you seem to buy into the "Gospel according to mainstream nutrition". Like any prayer, you seem to mindlessly repeat it, like some "universal Truth". And you didn't seem to have read the article -- nowhere does it claim there is anything wrong with grains!
This foolish assumption that if something is good for someone, it must be good for everyone is compelling, but it does make too many people sick, tired or obese.
Our "experts" have demonstrated repeatedly how stupid they assumptions can be.
Like Canadian government forcing Inuit to consume dairy products. The results were horrible.
Our culture seems to ignore ancient wisdom, which is a result of thousands of years of observation.
Here is some:
What's one man's cure is another man's poison.
-----
It is unwise to deviate too far from nutrition you have grown up on.
Because sugar is not arsenic, many graves are full....
You should only eat one kind of food at a time.
(it's fascinating to see our "modern" chefs mixing together more and more mutually incompatible ingredients into one dish, just to be "different" at at any cost)
The whiter the bread, the sooner you are dead.
There is a story about a boy who wanted to know how a fly functions, So he caught one and took it apart. Now he had all the parts but the fly didn't function anymore. So it is with our experts who are stubbornly trying to isolate a single cause and single effect. But results are useless, because that's not how real life works. The real life is a huge, mutually intertwined web of causes and effects.
Following is a line taken from the article:
"A table to help you do this is provided below so you can take a look, and this table is also included in the book."
However, when I tried to find that table, it was not there. I would like to see the table without having to by the book.
Thank you.
--jer
Yes, where is it? Thought for a minute I was having a "pre-senior" moment, after all I'm pushing the big 50!!!
To Mr. Hahn;
The nutritional types come from the areas of the world where our ancestors came from. Nordic ancestry lends itself to doing better on a protein diet, asian more carb based. It also has to do with the available food for the area. By the way, look at those two cultures size wise. Protien diets help the pituitary produce human growth hormone, while starch based diets inhibit production of HGH. There are some exeptions (Yow Ming for example) but generally Asians are smaller while Nordic ancestry produces larger people. The rest of us are somewhere in the middle.
I know I gain weight very quickly on a carb based diet and level out with a protein diet.
Gayle