best healthy food

 

According to food historian Francine Segan, who researched ancient texts for her cookbook The Philosopher's Kitchen, some ancient Greek athletes followed what resembled an early version of the Atkins diet. One text she studied, called The Deipnosophists—a 15-volume description of an epic feast that took place around A.D. 200— tells of an Olympic runner who won several races while subsisting solely on meat. As Segan told National Geographic, "This started a meat-only craze." She added that some Greek Olympians abstained from eating bread right before a competition, in contrast to the common modern-day practice of carb-loading.

Although the Atkins diet was an unintentional retread of the ancient Greek fad, the last few decades have seen an increased interest in ancient theories of healthy eating, especially traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic diets. I even found a book, called The Kemetic Diet, based on ancient Egyptian practices (the name derives from Kamit, the ancient word for the land we now call Egypt).

The author, Muata Abhaya Ashby, writes that good health, as the ancient Egyptians saw it, relies not only on food for the body but food for the soul and mind—a theory, he points out, that was a precursor to later ideas of holistic medicine. Physical disease, he continues, is caused by digesting impurities, which must be cleansed through the specific alkaline vegetarian diet outlined in the book (although most ancient Egyptians ate meat). A mainstay of the plan is drinking kamut wheatgrass juice, which comes from an ancient grain, and which Ashby claims acts as an "alkaline flush" in the body.

Ashby notes that the ancient Kamitans were the healthiest people of their time. Of course, they still only had an average life expectancy of 40, so I don't know how ringing of an endorsement that is.