The first stage in your journey towards better nutrition is to establish just where you are on this road already. Usually anyone wanting nutritional advice would attend a consultation with a nutritionist or diet specialist and spend perhaps over an hour completing a vast amount of form filling gathering data on your eating habits, nutritional requirements and so forth, however with the whole plant diet it is possible to gain sufficient information from a very simple questionnaire based on just twelve questions about your normal eating habits. This questionnaire is called the 4LeafSurvey and it is based on an eating concept designed to make it easy for everyone to learn how to eat a near-optimal diet.
The Worlds Finest Diet. Episode 4. Getting Started with the 4LeafSurvey.
The first stage in your journey towards better nutrition is to establish just where you are on this road already. Usually anyone wanting nutritional advice would attend a consultation with a nutritionist or diet specialist and spend perhaps over an hour completing a vast amount of form filling gathering data on your eating habits, nutritional requirements and so forth, however with the whole plant diet it is possible to gain sufficient information from a very simple questionnaire based on just twelve questions about your normal eating habits.
This questionnaire is called the 4LeafSurvey and it is based on an eating concept designed to make it easy for everyone to learn how to eat a near optimal diet.
Well, what in fact is an optimal diet for humans? This has been the basis of many thousands of hours of debate discussion and argument over the years but to cut to the chase let's just take a statement from the Cornell Professor who led the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted. He summarizes his conclusions after half a century in a career as a nutritional scientist as follows:
“The closer we get to eating a diet of whole, plant-based foods, the better off we will be” Dr.T.Colin Campbell, Ph.D., nutritional biochemist.
So the 4LeafSurvey is a guide to where a person is on this journey towards the optimal diet. There are six levels that are based primarily on the percentage of calories derived from whole plant foods.
At the bottom we call this a typical Western diet or the SAD Standard American Diet, it is the unhealthy diet and this usually contains a combination of meat, dairy, eggs, fish and more highly processed foods for almost every meal. This is probably the most popular diet style and is associated with a whole series of serious health problems and less than 10% of calories are derived from whole plants.
At the next level, which is better than most, the percentage of calories derived from whole plants ranges from 10 to 20%, and those at this level are trying to eat a little healthier diet but they do need a better understanding of what promotes good health.
At the one-leaf level we are looking at a diet that consists of between 20 and 40% of calories derived from whole plants. Although this is eating more plants than the majority of folks, people at this level are not consuming enough to provide much protection against disease.
At the two-leaf level the percentage of calories derived from whole plants has risen to 40 to 60% and you are now eating 4 to 5 times more whole plants than most. Those at this level are still falling short of ensuring long-term vibrant health.
At the three-leaf level 60 to 80% of calories are derived from plants. These people are getting over half the total calories from health promoting whole plant-based food and are experiencing many of the benefits of healthy eating.
At the four-leaf level over 80% of calories are derived from whole plants. In the West this represents a very small minority of the population, and these people tend to be trim and enjoy vibrant health, lots of energy, take no medications and rarely have any disease and are likely to live a long and healthy life.
So proceeding to complete this questionnaire, you will need to give your best estimate of your daily consumption of just twelve food groups. These are the questions you will need to answer:
Now that you have your 4LeafScore the next episode will give you the advice as to how to improve on it and so progress to an optimal diet for your health and wellbeing.