To give the two extremes carried to the ridiculous, you don’t have to include the right ratios of each food group on each bite, and you cannot eat a year of only fruit, then one of only meat, then one of only grain.
What is the window to eat a balanced diet? Every meal? Every day? Week?
well, i try each meal but in the past i have gone for a 24 hour period
I think the only way to do it per bite would be to make purina human chow …
It probably depends on which nutrients and foods you’re talking about. IME, it’s a good idea to keep a fairly consistent amount of fruits and vegetables day-to-day. The plumbing seems to have trouble with wildly varying quantities of fiber, carbohydrates, and protein. Other nutrients will stay in the body for days or weeks or months, depending how they’re stored and metabolized.
I understand that most large institutions (such as school cafeterias) aim to provide all the necessary nutrition over the course of a week.
I was thinking more along the lines of the basic food groups more than micronutrients and all that.
The reasons I ask are two. First, I have some friends who routinely include days of fasting or limited fasting on their diets and that set me thinking.
Secondly, my kids are very good eaters in the sense that they will eat pretty much everything, but they often want a lot of just one thing per meal. At one meal they will eat all their meat and not want to touch the carbs. The next meal they are all over the carbs and not want to touch the meat. And so on. Also, they are big fans of fruit and if you leave them to their own choices, they could easily eat only fruit for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They happily choose pears over ice cream.
I often manage to push them to eat everything on their plates, but life would be a lot easier if I could just leave them to fill up on mashed pumpkin for lunch and then fill up on fish for dinner. At what point could this turn against them?
Well, the problem in moving beyond meal-level management is moderating blood sugar levels and hunger. If you eat only a bunch of carbs at one meal, you’re going to be ravenous sooner. This is suboptimal and can even be dangerous in the long term, especially with simple carbs, because of the blood sugar spikes. A meal of just fruit on a regular basis is not going to be good in this regard.
However, other things can be planned on a daily basis a bit more easily. The diet I’m on is intended for weight loss, but it’s basically a protein and a complex carb at each meal (healthy fats spread throughout the day in low amounts). One time a day you skip the carb and just do protein. Veggies are added in at least three servings spread through the day.
I believe you mean Bachelor Chow.
The problem with trying to think of this on the level of servings per day is that those are an abstraction of what’s really going on. Your body doesn’t actually need those exact amounts of meats, grains, dairy, whatever, that’s just a reasonable example of how to get what you do need. Extreme diets like your one-food-per-year can cause problems, but you can get pretty close - for examples, the Inuit diet was/is very meat heavy (and apparently during winter was meat-only), fruitarians seem to be able to get away with nuts as protein and B12 supplements, and your average college student survives largely on Ramen.
Fibre: every day.
Everything else: once a day is fine. Your kids certainly aren’t going to be harmed if they eat a meal of nothing but meat and a meal of nothing but fruit provided they don’t eat too much of either.
The whole point of eating a balanced diet is to make sure that what your body needs is there when it’s needed. If you cut yourself or develop an infection you need to have certain substances circulating right then and there to deal with it. But your body has some capacity to store most nutrients, and food takes 12+ hours to pass fully digest anyway, so it’s not an issue.
Eating a bunch of carbs doesn’t make you ravenous sooner. You’re thinking of sugars. Starches are carbohydrate and are extremely slow to digest.
And even when considering sugar, that depends on the fruit, but it’s not really a problem. Fruits like bananas contain a lot of starch anyway, while fruits like apples have the sugars wrapped up within the cellulose of the cells, and that takes forever to break down.
It’s really only the citrus type fruits, where the sugars are held in water filled saccules, that you’d need to worry.
I remember my aunt speaking of a conversation with her daughter’s pediatrician about her daughter’s desire to only eat a few select foods for an extended period of time. The doctor suggested she keep track of her daughter’s diet over the course of a couple of weeks and she’d see that she was probably covering all the basic neccessities.
I think it’s well accepted that short fasts (up to a few days) by healthy people are generally safe and may have meaningful health benefits. Googling seems to support this, though not all sources are necessarily unbiased, and it is clear that various conditions could make fasting unwise.
80% of the mix over a day…and 20% over a week.
This sounds like an answer to what I am asking. Two weeks is a lot longer than my instinct would have guessed, but it would hardly be the first time my instinct is wrong.
My two kids are perfectly healthy. The boy is right on the middle of the weight/height curve for a kid two years older and ditto for my girl except that only one year ahead. They get sick as expected for kids in school and recover well and promptly. My concern on their side of the question is more academical than anything else. (and I make no effort in trying to understand what happens inside those little heads when they choose to eat one thing and leave behind something else that is higher on their lists of favorites).
I am not terribly concerned about the sugar issue on the carbs-only meals, firstly because they are never -only meals. They just heavily favor one thing over the other. Secondly, veggies are never pure sugar. We are talking mashed potatoes (with butter and cheese), rice (with broth, all kinds of veggies, beans and maybe ham), and things like that. Ditto for meats, there is always some sauce or breading or something.
I will have to pay more attention to fiber (although they eat prunes and almonds like candy). They are not big on greens. And very interesting the issue of citrus. Who knew?
As for my friends, they would rate as “nutty” in most people’s scale. One of them seems to think he can drink all he wants as long as he goes dry one full month every year. Another (whose health overview I respect as she is very meticulous about her diet and does look healthy) insists on the virtue of fasting one day every week (nothing but water). Other lives on greens and fish and then binges on sausage and steak at every barbeque.