Psoriasis diet - lighten up on meat and dairy

D: What I hear you saying is that the thing you absolutely need to do in your treatment program is more plants and less meat.

Yeah, I'm not a vegetarian. I'm a believer we have four teeth in our head to tear meat for a reason. But we also have eight times as many teeth to grind things. If you eat eight times as many bites that come from a plant as you comes from meat, that's health promoting.

And the University of Michigan's medical school has created what's called a healing foods pyramid. And that to me is my very favorite pyramid form of a healing foods pyramid meaning that when you eat this way, this way of eating can optimize your health. And not only prevent disease but potentially manage and reverse all different kinds of diseases.

At the bottom of their pyramid is water. The next step up is fruits and vegetables. The next step up is true whole grains and then you get into beans, nuts, lentils and seeds. And as you get towards the top of that pyramid you have meat, dairy and eggs. And at the very top of that they have chocolate and wine meaning that these things you eat on an occasional or rare basis.

D: When you say occasional or rare, does that mean weekly, daily?

Yeah, they even have the animal product as optional. If you want a healing effect, you don't need meat, dairy and eggs. I personally think there are some people that do need some meat. And the fact is that there are civilizations on our planet right now that are amongst the longest living on the planet and they have dairy in their diet every day.

But by the same token when you look at Asian populations these people don't have any dairy in their diet after they stop nursing as babies. They're not drinking milk. They're not eating cheese. They're not eating yogurt. They're not eating ice cream. They don't have anybody telling them to drink more milk to avoid osteoporosis and yet our incidence of osteoporosis is far, far greater than it is in Asian countries where they don't have any dairy in their diet.

So what I like about the University of Michigan healing foods pyramid is the flexibility meaning that different people are different. Different people will have different needs. Different people have different genetic . But what they are saying is that regardless of whether you have the meat, dairy and eggs in your diet these are things to have less occasionally. So the formula is basically for every bite of an animal product say meat, dairy and eggs, try to have eight bites of vegetables and fruits.