When navigating the overwhelming world of dietary advice, where conflicting "experts" and fad diets create confusion, a clear and grounded framework is essential for making sustainable, health-promoting food choices. Joel Greene’s The Way offers a compelling approach rooted in ancestral wisdom, natural rhythms, and scientific insight, cutting through the noise of modern diet trends.

By observing nature’s patterns — scarcity, variety, and cyclical eating — Greene emphasizes a return to diverse, balanced diets that align with our biology and the realities of time. The following step-by-step directive distills these principles into a practical guide for selecting a diet that prioritizes long-term health, minimizes toxicity, and respects individual needs, all while drawing authority from nature itself rather than fleeting trends or dogmatic food tribes.

1. Observe Nature as Your Authority

What to Do: Base your eating choices on nature’s patterns—seasonal cycles, hunger cues, and historical human diets.
Why It Matters: Nature provides a time-tested guide for eating, free from modern fads. Ancestors ate what was available, guided by instinct and environment.
How to Apply: Eat when you’re hungry, not by a schedule. Look to traditional diets (like Mediterranean or hunter-gatherer) or seasonal foods for inspiration.

2. Seek Variety, Nature’s Answer to Scarcity

What to Do: Pursue a wide range of foods—plants (greens, roots, berries), animals (meat, fish, dairy), and fermented options—to mirror ancestral eating habits shaped by unpredictable food availability.
Why It Matters: In times of scarcity, variety ensured survival by providing balanced nutrients and reducing dependence on one food source. Today, it keeps your diet rich and adaptable.
How to Apply: Switch it up—pair fish with leafy greens one day, then try berries with nuts the next. Use seasonal or local foods to let nature steer your choices.

3. Cycle Your Eating Patterns

What to Do: Alternate between light meals (foraging), no meals (fasting), regular eating (abundance), and hearty meals (feasting) based on your body’s needs and life’s rhythms.
Why It Matters: Nature’s cycles—lean times and plenty—keep your metabolism flexible and aligned with activity or seasons.
How to Apply: Try a day of salads, a morning fast, then a big dinner. Adjust protein or carbs—more when active, less when resting.

4. Prioritize Quality

What to Do: Choose fresh, whole, minimally processed foods over packaged or refined options.
Why It Matters: High-quality foods, like those our ancestors ate, deliver nutrients without artificial additives, supporting long-term health.
How to Apply: Source from farms, grow herbs, or pick unprocessed options—like fresh fish over canned.

5. Personalize Over Time

What to Do: Tweak your diet based on how your body responds, adjusting amounts or frequency to suit your unique needs.
Why It Matters: No one-size-fits-all exists—your diet should evolve with your lifestyle, energy, and health.
How to Apply: Track energy, digestion, or mood after meals. Test more carbs or fats for a week, then refine based on what works.

Myth #1: Eating fat will make you fat.

Truth: It’s true that fat is denser in calories than carbohydrates and proteins (more than twice the calories per gram), but obesity is not primarily due to an excess of calories consumed. It is the type of calories consumed that is important. Recent science shows that most surplus weight and obesity is caused by excess carbohydrates in the diet. Fats are a main source of energy. They are also an important source of fat-soluble vitamins and provide much of the pleasurable flavor and texture in food. Some (the omega fats) are, in fact, essential in our diet, as we can’t produce our own.

Myth #2: Saturated fats are bad for your heart.

Truth: There has never been any robust, conclusive evidence that saturated fats cause chronic disease. In fact, saturated fats are the cleanest-burning fuel you can put in your body. From a health perspective, saturated fats are not only benign, they’re beneficial.

Myth #3: Carbohydrates are essential to our bodies.

Truth: There are no essential carbohydrates. Your body evolved to make its own blood glucose from non-carbohydrate sources. When it does so, it makes the optimum amount for the present needs of the body. There are beneficial carbohydrates—soluble and insoluble fibers—but you can get plenty of these without also burdening your body with sugars and starch.

Myth #4: Gluten-free eating is the healthiest option.

Truth: If you have celiac disease or are gluten sensitive, by all means avoid gluten in your diet. Otherwise, keep in mind that most processed, gluten-free foods use substitutes like rice flour, potato starch, and tapioca flour. These and other starches rapidly raise blood glucose and insulin, aggravating diabetes and other chronic diseases. Gluten-free does not mean low-carbohydrate. In fact, it’s sometimes quite the opposite.

Myth #5: Everything in moderation.

Truth: To quote Canadian physician Dr. Jay Wortman, “Everything in moderation is an excuse we use to eat the things we shouldn’t eat.” Like the notion of a “balanced diet,” “everything in moderation” gives us license to trade off nutritious calories for empty ones. This is doubly dangerous when that junk food contains sugar, which activates the opiate receptors in our brain, stimulating our reward center. Each time we eat something sweet, we’re reinforcing those neuropathways and hardwiring our brains to crave the stuff. So, next time you catch yourself using “moderation” and “balance” as a rationale to consume foods you know are bad for you, it helps to remember that you’re not only fooling yourself, you’re compromising your health in the process.

Myth #6: To lose weight, you need to cut calories.

Truth: Cutting calories means you eat less food, and eating less food means you have less of an opportunity to meet daily nutritional requirements. If you are restricting calories to less than your daily needs, you will not only be perpetually hungry, but you will also reduce your metabolic rate, making weight loss more difficult. What’s more, once you return to your regular diet, there is a high probability that you will regain the weight you lost and are likely to put on even more.

Myth #7: Fruit is good for you because it’s natural.

Truth: Newsflash: fruit did not evolve to be a health food. Its evolutionary imperative is to spread its seeds, and the best way to do that is to get animals to eat it, move on, and deposit the seeds, some distance away, embedded in a healthy dollop of fertilizer. Sweet fruit is more attractive to animals—including humans—so job well done on the dispersal-system front. But the sweetness comes at a high cost not only in terms of high-carbohydrate starches but also fructose—a known toxin. The same goes for honey and maple syrup. Don’t be persuaded to buy and eat food simply because it’s considered natural.

Myth #8: All vegetables are created equal.

Truth: Many vegetables—especially root vegetables, beans, and grains (and, yes, I include grains as vegetables because they are plants)—are high in starch and can contribute to obesity and insulin resistance. Choose wisely.

Myth #9: If you work out, you can eat whatever you want.

Truth: Working out does burn calories, so your food intake should increase proportionally. However, science tells us that about 80 percent of weight management is determined by what you eat, not how many calories you burn. You lose weight in the kitchen; you get fit in the gym. If you eat poorly, exercise will not help you outrun the negative health consequences.

via The Bio Diet

The Way: A Step-by-Step Directive for Selecting a Diet

Top 9 Food Myths