Nutrition and Diet - too much or not enough?

Are you well fed? Chances are if you can read this message, you live in a part of the world where food is plentiful, and you are not challenged filled with the problem of starvation.  With our basic needs for food met, the focus turns from eating to live to optimizing the diet to best fit your health and body goals.

If starvation is one extreme on the nutrition continuum, on the other end are the high performance athletes who are finely tuning their diet to give their performance the competitive edge they need to excel.  In between the two extremes are the rest of us, with interest in changing our diets for various reasons - to improve overall health, to lose or gain weight, to feel better and to have more energy, to live longer and better. For the vast majority of people worldwide, (outside of countries whose people don't have enough food and safe water to drink), the major nutritional problem is not a lack of food or a lack of a specific nutrient - instead the problem is too much nutrition!

While many people spend a lot of effort and money supplementing their diets with vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients, focusing on this is just window dressing. If you're not optimizing your diet by eating the right foods in the right amounts for what you want to achieve and building a solid foundation of good eating habits, all the supplementation in the world will not help you achieve your goals - it's like smoking filtered cigarettes. The underlying problem of sub-optimal nutrition still exists - with the results of weight gain, extra body fat, heart disease and other chronic diseases associated with over consumption of nutrients. 

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