Harvard Healthy Diet

Harvard’s Healthy Diet

As I was cleaning out the garage the other day, I came across a back issue of one of my two favorite health magazines, Bottom Line Health. (I’ll introduce the other one next time.)

Anyway, their lead article was responding to the then-new USDA Food Guide Pyramid which, like its predecessors, reflects the food industry’s influence, and thus emphasizes meat and dairy products.[1]

The independent researchers at Harvard School of Public Health came up with another Healthy Eating Pyramid, radically different from the government one, but fully in line with all that I have been reading on this subject for more than thirty years (not that I am an expert; I am just saying I was not surprised by their findings).

To be brief: If you want to avoid unnecessary illnesses, such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, follow the guidelines below:

Make whole-grain foods the basis of your diet at each meal. That’s whole wheat bread, “brown” rice, and other whole grains. NO white rice or bread or pasta made with white flour.

Surprisingly, the other half of the bottom layer of the “pyramid” should consist of plant oils, “Including olive, canola, soy, corn, sunflower, peanut and other vegetable oils.”

Next come vegetables “in abundance” and fruits “2-3 times” a day.

Third from the bottom are nuts and legumes (peas and beans of all sorts), also to be eaten two or three times a day.

Fish, poultry and eggs may be consumed “0 –2 times” a day according to these Harvard researchers.

Finally, they advise that red meat, butter, as well as white rice, white bread, potatoes, pasta and sweets should be used “sparingly.”

To put it another way: If you want to die a slow, painful, and expensive death, or drop dead suddenly from a heart attack, have your full of red meat, milk, butter, white bread and pasta, topped off with lots of delicious desserts.

At least that’s what unbiased scientists at our top university have found, long after hundreds of other studies had come to similar conclusions.

[1] "Harvard's New Healthy Eating Plan," Bottom Line Health, Volume 19, Number 7, July, 2005, pages 1-3. To subscribe, go to BLHealth@Boardroom.com.