WARMING Fats Meat Black pepper Tomato sauce Salty cheeses Chocolate Bean soup
COOLING Ice cream Fruits, lettuce Cayenne, paprika Raw tomato Yogurt, milk Soft drinks Pickles
ACID-FORMING Sugar Bread, pasta Meat, fowl, fish Fats
ALKALIZING Coffee Juices, fruits Lettuce, vegetables Salt
NUTRIENT PROPORTIONS According to the Dietary Goals report, Americans, on the average, eat 42 percent of their calories in fats, 12 percent in proteins, and 46 percent in carbohydrates, of which more than half( 24 percent of the diet as a whole) is sugar. 1 Two-thirds of their caloric intake, then, is derived from fats and sugar. PERCENTAGES OF CALORIES OBTAINED FROM VARIOUS NUTRIENTS IN THE STANDARD AMERICAN DIET
BALANCE It is attained by counterpointing incomplete, or partial foods( see“ Nutrient Proportions in Foods,” this page): meat( no carbohydrates) with sugar( no proteins), or white flour( very little proteins), and so on. Because so many foods in the S. A. D. are not whole foods, and the complementary relationship of partial foods is seldom precise, balance is extremely precarious. EFFECTS There has never been in the history of humanity a dietary system quite like this one. It is a very young diet, maybe a couple of hundred years old in some of its elements( bacon and eggs), thirty or forty in others( freezedried coffee, breakfast cereals, powdered artificial drinks). One of its interesting effects is the same as noted in traditional societies that have abruptly changed their eating habits: Because the food eaten by the children is often different from what their parents ate in their own youth, and the food consumed by pregnant women is totally different from what their own grandmothers traditionally ate, intra- and extra-uterine environmental influences are overriding heredity. 2 The physical aspect of younger generations is changing so dramatically that often children do not resemble