In America today, people are more likely to be overnourished than undernourished.
In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that almost 40 percent of American adults and nearly 20 percent of adolescents are obese — the highest rates ever recorded for the U.S.
In total, more than 70 percent of Americans are now either overweight or obese, meaning that an unhealthy weight has become the norm, with healthy-weight Americans — who have a BMI of less than 25 — now in the minority.
Here are some simple recommendations:
Eat a salad every day and have vegetables with every meal. Snack on fruits. Eat more plant-based proteins and make sure to combine them so that they create complete proteins. Limit saturated fats and focus instead on healthier monounsaturated fats (olives, avocados, nuts, seeds) and healthy oils (olive-mono, avocado-mono, flaxseed-poly and grapeseed-poly) and polyunsaturated fats, the latter of which contain the omega-3 fatty acids found in fatty fish, flaxseed and walnuts, for example.
As Hippocrates famously said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”