What's the One Missing Thing from Your Healthy Diet?

You could be eating a perfect diet, but you’d still be missing out on this one thing. Watch this video to find out what it is.

Video Transcript

Hi, Dr. Bill Rawls here. The question is, what’s the one thing that’s missing from your healthy diet? So you’re trying to eat a healthier diet. I think it’s really important to define what’s healthy.

What’s healthy for you is what’s healthy for your cells. Your cells need specific nutrients, oxygen, and water. The types of nutrients that your cells need to function optimally are defined by what humans have eaten through history.

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans ate a foraged food diet. That included really anything that might have calories. So they ate stems and leaves off of plants, roots, bark, wild berries, and about two-thirds of it in most locations on earth was vegetable matter, and then you had animal matter, which was a lot of protein, but not necessarily much fat.

The thing that was missing in the ancient forage food diet was sources of calories, carbohydrates and fat. They’re so important that it drives our taste buds. So as we move toward agriculture, and most recently in the past 100 years toward really high production of grains at an industrial level, we’ve really shifted that from a lean diet that had lots of nutrients to a diet that was really loaded with carbohydrates and fat. What’s not good for our cells is lots of carbohydrates and fat.

Now, even today’s diet with meats and grain are giving you the vitamins and minerals that you need, because if you didn’t get those, you’d die. So even a bad diet today is providing most of those things. The problem with our diets today is too much carbohydrate, too much fat. The one thing that is missing is phytochemicals.

What are phytochemicals? Well, that ancient forage food diet, the stems and leaves and bark, and wild berries had all kinds of chemicals in them that protected the plant, and our cells became reliant on those things. But many of those chemicals are bitter, and you have to eat a lot of the plant material to get enough of those things to offer the kinds of benefits to your cells that you really want.

What are the benefits? Potent anti-oxidants, protection from microbes, protection from free radicals, and toxic substances. Those plant chemicals offered our cells a lot of protection that we’re not getting today. So the phytochemicals are very, very important.

In cultivated diets, as we cultivated our food, we cultivated a lot of those protective chemical out of the food. Agriculture, that started changing things, and we’ve ramped it up even more. So even if you’re eating that 50% vegetable level that I recommend, your vegetables aren’t necessarily having those robust concentrations of phytochemicals that your cells really depend on. The way to get those things is by taking herbal supplements.

Herbal supplements provide all of those important protective phytochemicals that were in the stems and leaves and bark and wild berries. That’s what herbs are. So when you take herbs as part of your daily regimen of food, and usually in supplement form, that enhances a lot of protective qualities that are really missing from our current, even healthy diet.

Discover more in Dr. Bill Rawls' new #1 Bestselling book: The Cellular Wellness Solution: Tap Into Your Full Health Potential with the Science-Backed Power of Herbs.