SHDC | Recommended Diet

We sat down with Dr Ron Ehrlich and asked him what SHDC recommends as the optimal diet.

Question:

What is the SHDC recommended diet?

Dr Ron:

The ideal diet that we encourage our patients and ourselves to eat would be (for the vast majority of our diet) above-ground vegetables. That should form the vast majority of our diet, along with a moderate amount of quality protein. By quality protein I mean pasture-fed and finished animal products, these are significantly better than the alternative of grain-fed but should be consumed in moderation. Too much protein is not a good thing, and I think as a general guide it should be .8 of a gram, but let’s make it easy and say 1 gram per kilogram of weight. So, if you were an 80-kilogram person, then you should be eating around 80 grams of protein a day or between 65 and 80 grams of protein a day. There are very easy ways of working out the amount of protein in a food. In terms of protein in lamb, beef and pork a third of the weight of the meat is protein. In terms of fish and chicken, a fifth of the weight of the meat is protein. In egg, a tenth of the weight; so if you’re eating a 70-gram egg that would be 7 grams protein. So incorporating a moderate amount of protein in your diet is very important, granted it is good quality protein.

Good fat is also essential. Those good fats are butter, coconut oil, olive oil, sesame oil, macadamia nut oil and the fat from animals that have been pasture-fed and finished. Pasture feeding is very important because the combination of omega-3 and omega-6 is much more naturally balanced in pasture-fed and finished protein than it is in this grain-fed meat which I would definitely stay away from.

Water is the best drink and we do prefer as clean water as possible. In our own house, we use a reverse osmosis filter which removes all of the impurities including fluoride from the water. We would also recommend good quality salt, by that I mean Himalayan sea salt, Himalayan rock salt or Celtic sea salt. Fruits in moderation and seasonally, I think berries are an excellent fruit as a good example, that’s seasonal fruits.

On top of that, when it comes to seafood, again I think there are some issues there with seafood about sustainability and toxicity. The sustainability of fish stocks has been reduced by 90% in the last 20 or 30 years. There’s a rumoured issue about sustainability and there are real issues about toxicity even within farmed fish. I suppose the best choice of seafood would be line-caught sardines.

So I would also be moderating or eliminating sugar. I would also suggest moderating grains and if one had a diagnosable autoimmune disease, then I would eliminate grains completely. Caffeine is also in moderation, and alcohol is definitely in moderation.