FOOD BASICS

Healthy eating doesn’t need to be complicated. Just follow these guidelines to keep it simple

GO FREE RANGE

That value crate of cage-raised eggs might look tempting, but this is about what’s good for you so it’s worth remembering that organic and free-range meat and fish is better for your body.

Free-range chickens, for example, have a more varied diet and get a lot more exercise. This means they develop more muscle, which tends to contain more zinc, vitamins B, A and K, amino acids, iron, selenium and minerals.

And farm-raised salmon have also been found to contain up to eight times the level of carcinogens as their wild brethren, thanks to cramped conditions and poor-quality feed. Grass-fed beef, meanwhile, tends to have much higher levels of conjugated linoleic acid and omega-3 fats than the kind fed on grain and beef tallow.

Eating free range feels less like a frivolous luxury if you think of it this way: it’s so nutritionally dissimilar to cage-reared that it’s basically different food.

In brief: Eat free-range chickens, grass-fed beef and wild-caught salmon when you can. If you don’t know where it’s from, chances are the answer isn’t good. Know where your food has come from – it nourishes you after all!

STICK TO REAL FOOD

Follow this simple rule of thumb: only eat food that grows in the ground or once had a face. If you do this, you’ll end up following all the other rules almost by default.

Alternatively, simply go caveman and think like a hunter-gatherer. When you’re looking at something on the shelf, ask yourself if it would have existed 5000 years ago. Seriously. If the answer’s no, it probably isn’t anything that you should be eating.

You may find it easier to stick to the outer aisles of the supermarket, which is where all the fresh produce is usually kept for ease of transportation, and away from the interior where everything’s canned, processed or packed full of preservatives. Avoid things containing those preservatives with the ridiculously long words you can’t spell, or ingredients you wouldn’t keep in the kitchen; eat things that will rot eventually, so that you know they’re fresh.

In brief: Eat food, not products pretending to be food.

DON’T COUNT CALORIES

Plenty of people still treat the amount of calories they’re shovelling in as the most important thing about the food they eat. That isn’t the case. Calories are not a good indication of what a food is like nutritionally and the effect it’s going to have on your metabolic rate.

Not convinced? Think of it this way: would you say that a couple of poached eggs are the ‘same’ as a can of Coke because they contain a similar amount of calories? Us neither.

Also, counting calories makes it too easy to justify bad dietary decisions. Ever heard a friend say that they can eat what they want because they’ll burn it off at the gym? That’s rubbish. They couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, the more active you are, the better your nutrition needs to be.

Arguably more important than the calorie content is your food’s glycaemic load (GL), which indicates how much of a blood sugar spike it’ll give you – thing is, manufacturers aren’t required to put glycaemic load on packaging.

However, if you’re following our guidelines you shouldn’t have a problem with this anyway. Steering clear of starchy carbohydrates and sugar means you are already avoiding foods with high GL anyway.

If you do eat high-GL foods, you can also slow the absorption rate – and thereby help prevent blood sugar wobbles – by eating them alongside more protein-heavy foods such as chicken or tuna.

In brief: Think quality, not quantities. Eating nutritious food is much better than sticking rigidly to a 2000-calorie-a-day limit that comes from crisps and toast with jam.