Welcome back to the final episode of Your Health Is No Big Thing—It’s a Million Little Things, things that you can do on a daily basis that have important implications for your well-being. So what can you do right now? Let’s start with a few little things that can have a profound effect on your health within the next few months: 

1. Reduce and then avoid processed foods, which means anything precooked or prepackaged and includes boxes of refined, sugary snacks and cereals. Cook cereals for your children. Cooking oatmeal is much less expensive than buying processed grains with added sugar. 

2. Eat full-fat, nutrient-rich foods. Consider real aged cheeses, butter, whole milk, yogurt, avocado, nuts, and seeds. You can eat fish, chicken, pork, shellfish, or red meat, if you so desire, as part of a balanced diet. But you are not required to eat meat, as it is possible to be healthy without eating animal flesh. However, it is important to eat the saturated fats that animal products supply. Whole-fat dairy products, along with eggs, provide even vegetarians with the fat-soluble vitamins needed for strong bones and healthy teeth. Don't forget Wendy White’s salad dressing comparison. She demonstrated that for our bodies to extract nutrients from our food, we need to consume fats with our vegetables. 

3. Reduce and then avoid adding sugar to your diet. The latest US Dietary Guidelines for Americans (2020-2025) limits sugar to 10% of your daily calorie intake, or about 10-14 teaspoons of sugar per day . . . that’s a bit tricky when one can of soda alone contains an average of 10 teaspoons of sugar. Currently Americans eat an average of 152 pounds of sugar a year, which averages out to six cups of sugar a week. SIX CUPS A WEEK! That’s almost a cup of sugar every single day for every American!! WOW that is an astounding amount of sugar for each of us every week.

How can you eliminate this sugar overload from your diet? Fresh fruits are good substitutes for sugar, and dried fruits retain their nutrient-rich skins. Dark chocolate snacks with low sugar are a yummy choice for healthy fats. Several vegetables, like carrots, add sweetness to food, once your taste buds have recovered from sugar overload.

4. Examine your diet and ask yourself: Where am I getting fat-soluble vitamins in my food? How can I increase them in my diet by adding delicious fats? Watch how your mind reacts when you put a pat of butter on your morning toast. Please change your thinking to realize that this is a healthy choice. After you choose your favorite meat or protein for dinner, imagine it surrounded by colorful and delicious veggies topped with a pat of butter or a lovely cheese sauce. Encourage your children to have cheese and crackers for their afternoon snack or nuts and fruits, like apples with nut butter. Yum!

5. Most important of all, enjoy your food and enjoy it as often as possible with family and friends.

So that’s my story in celebration of fats. Hopefully you have learned something about the biochemistry of fats, the nutrients they contain, and the health benefits of consuming saturated fats in your diet. I have shared some of the history of how we got to this place: How saturated fats were wrongly demonized, and how manufactured oils that are unhealthy were wrongly given a stamp of approval. For many of you this may be new information and somewhat shocking as well. When I shared this information with my sister who is a nurse, she said, “I feel so betrayed.” And so should you, especially if you're a parent!

As a young medical student in Naturopathic Medical School, I too was taught that a low-fat diet was the best way to eat for a healthy life. Like many other health care-professions, we were educated in the best nutrition knowledge available at the time, or so we thought. The low-fat diet was supposed to reduce the incidence of heart disease and prevent you from getting cancer. But the truth is—the low fat diet has NEVER been shown to reduce cancer or heart disease or be helpful in any other way except to make us fatter!

My hope is that, armed with this information, each and every one of you can take a step each and every day to make different food choices in your life. Take a step to enjoy the healthy fats provided to us by nature. Seek out sources of these foods from local farmers, your farmers market, or a food coop. If your town doesn’t have one, get your friends together and start one. Or ask your supermarket to offer these foods.

Become the Team Captain of your own health-care team and begin the adventure of making food changes in your life. Continue to educate yourselves, your family and friends, and even your doctors. Ask them to read The Big FAT Surprise by investigative journalist Nina Teicholz and download The Journals of the American College of Cardiology article “Saturated Fats and Health: A Reassessment and Proposal for Food-Based Recommendations'' from our website yourhealthisnobigthing.net. Please check out and enjoy other resources there as well. 

By taking one step forward each day toward eating real food, you can change the course of your health. YOU becoming healthier matters for us all. YOU becoming healthier matters for our children now and in the future. We can no longer stand by and continue to let outdated science be foisted on innocent children, whose life-long health is being dramatically altered. Please start making small changes in what you eat now—for the sake of our children, our country, and our future. 

This is Dr. DeLaney signing off and reminding you to eat real food and really enjoy it!