Top 10 Healthy Foods You Must Eat

hello health champions today we're going to talk about the top 10 healthiest

foods to eat coming right up hey I'm dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a

former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly master health by

understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and hit that

notification bell so you don't miss anything and make sure that you watch

all the way through the video because I'm not just gonna list various

different foods I'm gonna talk about why these foods are good for you and then at

the end we're gonna have a little bonus for you because we all need a little

treat in life at first I was gonna try to list the top ten healthiest foods but

then I thought that's kind of misleading because it leaves out so many other

foods and it also tends to give us the wrong idea about what a food is supposed

to do so often I see examples of superfoods people say this is the food

that you should eat or they'll say something like what's the number-one

healthiest food for us to eat and then people want to find out what that is and

they want to eat nothing but that and that gives us the wrong idea of food it

gives us the idea that the food is supposed to do something I often get the

question so I have a headache what food am I supposed to eat I have high blood

pressure what food am I supposed to eat you're supposed to eat a variety of food

the foods aren't supposed to do anything in terms of treating or changing or

altering body function they're just supposed to provide the stuff that your

body needs all right so we want to get away from the idea of superfoods okay I

think there's some foods that get pretty close like there's just so jam-packed of

good stuff there's just nothing bad to say about them but we don't want to

think about them as treating anything we want to get away from the number one

healthiest food we want to understand that it's the variety that complements

each other and gives the body all the different building blocks and

all the different catalysts and vitamins and minerals that it's gonna need

another thing I want to caution on is natural foods just because something is

in the section called natural food doesn't mean it's necessarily a health

food they're often made with better ingredients they don't use as many

chemicals but very often there's still highly processed so just be aware of

that and every time I see that section in a grocery store that's called natural

food I can't help but laugh because I ask myself if there is a section called

natural foods why don't they label the rest of the

store unnatural foods just a thought so because there's so many healthy foods I

didn't want to just talk about single items I'm going to talk about categories

and the first category of healthy food I believe are non starchy vegetables all

right so again I'm not listing these in any particular order because it's the

variety that provides the nutrition so non starchy vegetables include leafy

greens so lettuce and spinach and kale and any sort of leaf is going to be very

very high in nutrients in minerals and vitamins in fiber and it's going to be

very low in carbohydrates and starch and sugar so pretty much any leafy green

just eat as much as you can then there are things like broccoli and cauliflower

and Brussels sprouts and these aren't leafy but there's still low starch so

those are also things that you can eat so learn as you go which vegetables have

less than 5% carbs 5% net carbs so you take the total carbs you subtract the

fiber because some things have like 15 grams of carbs but it's almost all fiber

then those are still perfectly fine alright so learn which ones have less

than 5% net ARBs and those you can eat plenty of and

these vegetables provide enormous amounts of nutrients such as vitamins

and minerals primarily number two berries alright there is a lot of talk

about fruits and berries and vegetables so here's my little caveat here I think

that you can eat some berries but I don't think that more is better and I

think that berries are the best type of fruit to eat because most fruit has been

altered our ancestors might have had some access to fruit but their fruit was

small and tart and it was seasonal alright so humans have never had access

to sweet juicy fruit large fruit 365 days a year that we do now and therefore

that provides a lot of sugar even though it does have a lot of nutrients it does

provide more sugar than humans should probably have in the long run so eat

some berries eat a little bit of fruit but eat it sparingly and don't think

that you have to have it all the time now berries are the best

because they are the lowest in sugar they are the highest in fiber and their

jam-packed with vitamins the best berries are strawberries raspberries

blackberries and blueberries right they're the lowest in sugar and the

highest in nutrients category number three are meat animal proteins all right

they provide a full spectrum of essential amino acids they are one of

the few food groups that humans could live on for a very long time and survive

alright most other things that we would eat exclusively for a short time we

would perish we would get some sort of deficiency or we just wouldn't get

enough fuel or nutrients to survive but animal proteins especially the fat kinds

provide enough nutrients that we could live

for years I'm not saying that's optimal even though some carnivores are doing

really well on that so that would include beef pork chicken lamb and any

form of wild animals so rabbit and venison and Buffalo etc and then of

course fish so salmon sardines mackerel the clean fatty fish that provide tons

and tons of the good omega-3s are the best ones to choose now the thing to

remember here is that when you eat an animal then you're only getting food

that is as healthy as what that animal ate and if that animal ate a diet that

was innate for that species all right so I would do my very best to avoid beef

that has been fed to grain because that's very unnatural for a cow to eat

grain they do that because it makes the meat more tender it makes the meat fatty

and it makes the cow grow it's getting getting a growth spurt they're getting

like double the meat out of the cow is to feed it grain for a few months right

so they do that for money and for tenderness and for all the wrong reasons

but a cow is supposed to eat grass and only grass and if it does it's a healthy

cow the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is going to be in a good balance if you

feed it grain now you're messing with nature and you throw that off so if you

think that grass-fed is too expensive then do the best you can so you start

with one thing and then as you learn and maybe as you develop some habits that

will save you money then you can work your way up all right but do the best

you can and eat food that has been raised in a natural way so for fish you

want to absolutely do wild-caught only because the farm-raised it's just like

the cows they feed them things they're not supposed to eat and then

they're not very healthy when we mess with nature when we try to change the

rules it never ends up in a good way number 4 eggs so there's all sorts of

healthy eggs if they come from healthy animals there's duck eggs and ostrich

eggs and so forth but for practical purposes most people are going to talk

about eggs from hens or chickens and now what you're looking for again is the

higher quality the if the animal if the hen lived a natural healthy life then

it's gonna make natural healthy eggs if we feed the hen garbage and hormones and

food pellets and we keep it inside and we crowd them and we stress them then

the eggs are going to be pale and devoid of nutrients if not toxic so what we're

looking for is a standard called pasture raised in the United States that's a new

standard and it means that even in in commercial production there's a way of

making healthy eggs and it means every chicken lives basically outdoors and

they have at least a hundred and eight square feet per animal per chicken so

that gives them a lot of space they run around outside they eat bugs they eat

grass they eat seeds and sometimes they supplement a little bit with various

grains but that's not a terrible thing for a chicken but the main thing is that

they have to run around and they have to have a choice of what to eat and they

can't be crowded when you look at those eggs you crack them open then the yolk

is a deep orange right the mass-produced cheap eggs from sick

chickens is a pale yellow you can almost not tell that it's yellow that's how

pale they are sometimes whereas the pasture race is a deep orange and what

you can also tell oftentimes is that the yolk will be larger even in like a

medium egg it seems like the yolk is really

now someone brought to my attention I didn't even know this but I have looked

and I've seen these in stores that what you want is pasture-raised not

pasteurized all right pasteurized just means that they take

the cheap eggs from sick chickens and they steam them right they sterilize

them with steam or something so they they pasteurize them all right that's

not what you're looking for category number five is fats and oils a fat has

been demonized because they don't understand that the fat on the body does

not come from the fat that we eat the fat on the body is stored by a hormone

called insulin that is a result of fructose and sucrose and starches and

processed foods but if you eat a diet that doesn't promote insulin then fat is

perfectly fine and they rule the key for the fats and oils is that they need to

be in a natural state in a relatively natural state so it's great if you get

the fat in the food itself but it's totally okay to eat fats and oils like

refined isolated fats and oils as long as they're done in the right way meaning

minimally processed not heated so things like grass-fed butter is excellent

organic grass-fed butter is a great food I go through a lot of that organic extra

virgin olive oil organic coconut oil and recently you can find more and more

frequent and affordable MCT oil medium medium chain triglycerides and then some

other fats that people don't understand are actually pretty good are lard and

tallow meaning pork fat and beef fat again if it comes from a healthy animal

then they're perfectly fine so if I make some beef broth some bone broth from

healthy grass-fed organic animals if you make a big pot you might get four

or five pounds of tallow left over so you can skim that off you can save it

and use for cooking and if you know where it comes from then it's a healthy

fat and something to keep in mind about these concentrated fats is that most

pesticides most toxins most hormones are fat soluble that means that if you

concentrate the fat into these products you're also going to concentrate the

toxins that's why fats it's worth spending a

few extra dollars on getting the organic and the clean stuff because if you don't

then you're buying a product that has concentrated the toxins along with it

category number six are nuts and they can be an incredibly healthy

food right you don't want to overdo it because they do contain some Omega 6s

you don't want to make it like the main part you won't want to make it a

foundation of your diet but mixed in as part of all the other stuff it's a very

very healthy food and you want to focus on the nuts that meet three criteria the

ones that taste good raw because raw maintains keeps more nutrients alive

once you roast them or process them then they lose nutrients and you can alter

some of the fats in there you also want something that is low in carbohydrates

and you want something that's high in fat because the highest one in fat means

they have the lowest amount of carbohydrate and in that order

we have macadamia nuts and pecans and walnuts and almonds so these meet all of

those criteria that I talked about walnuts and almonds are a little bit

higher in carbohydrate but you're not going to eat a ton of these nuts because

they're so dense that you're typically going to be okay even on a low carb or a

ketogenic diet another great thing about nuts is that they're also very high in

fiber and they're very high in protein so you're getting a lot of nutrients all

packed into a little bit of food category number seven is seeds and

they're often kind of lumped together with the nuts but I like to put them

separate because they are quite different and you don't really use them

the same way a lot of the times and especially not the ones that I emphasize

so my favorite seeds are chia flax hemp and pumpkin and while the nuts are

things that you can often bring in a snack bag and you just take a few and it

you can crunch on them and it tastes good you're probably not gonna be

munching on flax seed and chia seed they sort of just sit there in your mouth and

you got to chew forever and they don't taste bad but it's not the way that you

typically eat those but they're great for low heat cooking you can make sort

of like an oatmeal with them you can bake bread with them as long as you keep

the heat down they're great for smoothies and if you eat something like

yogurt then instead of cereal you can just grind up some of this and put on

the yogurt instead of cereal and what seeds have speaking for them is that

they're usually very very inexpensive especially recently as they become more

popular you can find in the United States you can find these at Costco and

it's like they're just giving them away almost and they're extremely high in

healthy fats in fiber and in protein it's like they just packed those things

in there and there's virtually zero carbohydrate in there even though the

total carbs can look high it's almost all fiber so the net carbs are very very

low they're like three four percent and you don't want to rely on plant food for

Omega threes exclusively but they can be a good foundation and Chia and flax have

the highest level of omega-3 fatty acids in of any plant but you

still want to get some omega-3s from fish because the Chia and flax omega-3s

they're just the precursor and the conversion doesn't happen the way it's

supposed to and it doesn't happen in a very large degree to a very large

percentage some people say you can eat these omega-3s and make fish oil but it

doesn't work like that a lot of people convert as little as 1%

of the omega-3s implants into the actual omega-3 that we get from fish number

eight is avocado and I think that's not necessarily a superfood because like I

said I don't want to think of foods that way but I think it's so great in so many

ways that I made it its own category all right

it is great tasting it's creamy it's high in natural fats you can eat it raw

you can just open it up and spoon it or you can cook with it you can put it in

dishes you can make guacamole from it and it is so satisfying that it becomes

almost a meal in itself it goes with anything like who can argue with avocado

another thing I recently talked about the fasting mimicking diet and avocado

would be the perfect food there because it's high in fat and it's very low in

carbohydrate and it's very low in protein so it's like it's really the

perfect food don't think of it as a superfood just think of it as a great

staple that fits with everything category number nine is something called

tubers or root vegetables they grow underground and they're usually pretty

starchy they serve as an energy reserve for the plant and examples would be yam

or sweet potato potatoes rutabagas turnips carrots and something called

celery a core celery root now these are very starchy so some people want to

avoid them if you are trying lose weight if you're on a very low carb

diet if you're doing keto or if you're insulin-resistant then you do not want

to eat these hardly at all but if your insulin sensitive you reach your goal

weight or if you're doing some some carb cycling maybe you're doing keto during

the week and then you're loading up a little bit more on carbs during the

weekend then these are the perfect foods to get some quality food with some carbs

without getting into grains and things that cause inflammation they are however

very starchy so you don't want to eat too much of them but they're great you

can use them instead of potatoes for mashed potatoes or you can use several

of them to mix them up a little bit to get some more variety and a deeper

flavor they're also great to chop up in little cubes if you're doing a vegetable

soup or a beef soup or something like that category number 10 is herbs and

spices so things like garlic and ginger and turmeric cinnamon cloves cardamom

cilantro parsley dill rosemary all of these are highly highly nutritious all

right they provide micronutrients you're not gonna get many macronutrients you're

not gonna get any protein or fat or carbs to speak of but you're gonna get

lots of minerals you're gonna get lots of vitamins and you're gonna get some

things with medicinal properties but on a natural level so I don't want to think

of them as medication right there are supplements you can use herbs and and

these do have some tremendous benefits but again think of them mostly as things

that make food taste wonderful all right but garlic ginger turmeric they do have

antibacterial antifungal antiviral properties the turmeric is

anti-inflammatory it helps with gut healing so and cinnamon has been shown

to have some benefits one blood sugar so there are some tremendous

benefits to these just don't get go crazy and start using them as drugs

don't think of them as taking something for something just incorporate them

frequently in a healthy diet all right here's a little bonus for you

and it's something that isn't necessarily like a food but we have to

have some treats in life I think that makes life a little sweeter but we want

to understand what we're getting so chocolate is something that gets people

really excited and a lot of people they say oh I'll give up anything but I'm not

gonna give up chocolate but there's a big difference between milk chocolate

and dark chocolates so when people talk about the benefits of chocolate they say

oh well dark chocolate has all these benefits the reason is that cocoa has

nutrients all right the cocoa bean is a plant with

some nutrients that can be very beneficial but milk chocolate has a lot

of sugar that ruins and more than ruins the benefits so the darker the chocolate

is the less sugar it has and the way you can sort of get a rough idea is that if

you're getting a 78% cocoa content in the chocolate then the rest is sugar so

you just whatever isn't cocoa is sugar if it's got 85% cocoa it's 15% sugar

right so chocolate is pretty high in carbohydrate but most of that

carbohydrate is fiber so you can subtract it so I like chocolate that's

somewhere between 78 and 85 sometimes I think that 78 is the only good one and

other times I think oh the 78 is too sweet and I prefer the 85 but the darker

it is the more satisfying it is the less you feel the need to overeat and with a

piece of 78 percent chocolate so if you have something like a lint bar

that one has eight pieces in a bar so if you have one piece that's 1/8 of a bar

that gives you about 1.5 grams of sugar all right so if you're trying to keep

absolute zero on the sugar then don't eat chocolate but if you have one or

maybe two pieces you're not adding a tremendous amount and if you get up to

85% you're getting about one gram of sugar per piece a lot of my patients

will tell me that you know I can tolerate some dark chocolate but I can't

get higher than 50% cocoa content everything else is just too bitter

well don't fear you can change that all right it's gonna take a little bit of

time but the more you cut out the sweets and the sugar out of your diet the more

your taste buds change right most of our tastes are learned and the

more you get away from sugar the more you're gonna find a lot of things that

you thought were normally sweet they're disgustingly sweet and as you work your

way up as you get more adapted to real food and you cut out the sugar

you're gonna start appreciating the flavor of all these things you're gonna

learn what they actually taste like and then you're not gonna have a problem

with very dark chocolates so 75 78 85 even 90% chocolate is going to be very

flavorful and not all that bitter and if you don't like chocolate then don't

worry you don't have to learn it's not something that you have to have it's not

a basic food group stick with the other ten that we talked about and you'll be

fine if you enjoyed this video then go ahead and check out that one thank you

so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video