The Fundamentals of Nutrition, Hydration & Performance Fueling

And I'll give you fair warning, friends, this one is not short.

But we can keep it easily digestible.

The 90% to me is a way of saying, look, if you were to examine every nutrition program, every theme, every diet, every eating style, you'll start to realize there's a bunch of common themes.

There's eight billion of us, friends.

We have tons of different goals and backgrounds and restrictions and limitations.

So this is gonna create thousands if not hundreds of thousands of different individual options.

So rather than trying to cover a bunch of them, what I like to do and what I have most joy in is zooming out and saying, "Okay, what is consistent amongst all of them, or many of them, or most of them?" And one of the things you'll start to realize in this field is many, most, if not even all of them, are hitting the same exact concepts, but they're using wildly different methods.

So what I wanted to do in the 90% is to say, "Look, what are 90% of the good nutritional plans or diets or however you like to phrase these things, what's consistent among them? And then what are examples of the infinite different methods you could go about achieving them?" I typically will describe this in somewhere between 10 and 15 different things, and I'm, I'm not gonna keep a particular count, though you can do that at home and perhaps tell me how many I landed on.

But this is this type of stuff we start to think about.

First on our list is food quality.

Almost all s- evidence-based and effective programs are gonna have a hedge towards that and is typically the top or close to the top of your priority list.

Now, what does food quality mean? It's a very lengthy discussion.

But most of us would agree you're gonna be spending most of your time, and by the way, you should be recognizing the specificity of my language here.

I'm not using "always." I'm probably will never use the word "never" here.

It's just what are m- This is why I call it the 90%.

What are most diets doing for most people that's mostly effective? So that means in this scenario, most of the time you're choosing higher quality foods.

Doesn't mean always.

Higher quality foods most of the time are single ingredient foods.

They're minimally processed.

There's plenty of exceptions, of course, and there's a lot of discourse right now about what is actually defined as a quality processed food because there can be some, things like cheese and whey protein.

These are processed, but they're generally regarded as reasonably high quality foods.

And where no one would argue things like spinach and kale and blueberries are not quality.

So there's some obvious ones, there's some less than obvious ones, and then there's some downright confusing ones that I don't even know how to score, frankly, like yogurt, sauerkraut.

They're technically processed.

And then of course, you have chips and highly processed junk foods, and no one's gonna argue those are super healthy foods.